In Their Own Words

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

In this episode, John Dues and Andrew Stotz apply lessons five through seven of the 10 Key Lessons for implementing Deming in classrooms. They continue using Jessica's fourth-grade science class as an example to illustrate the concepts in action. 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 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 five about goal setting through a Deming lens. John, take it away. 0:00:23.2 John Dues: Yeah, it's good to be back, Andrew. Yeah, like you said, for the past few episodes we've been talking about organizational goal setting. We covered four healthy conditions, or four conditions of healthy goal setting and 10 key lessons for data analysis. And then what we turn to in the last episode is looking at an applied example of the 10 key lessons for data analysis and in action. And, if you remember from last time we were looking at this improvement project from Jessica Cutler, she's a fourth grade science teacher, and she did the improvement fellowship here at United Schools Network, where she learned the tools, the techniques, the philosophies, the processes behind the Deming theory, continual improvement, that type of thing. And in... And in Jessica's specific case, in her fourth grade science class, what she was settled on that she was gonna improve was, the joy in learning of her students. And we looked at lessons one through four through the eyes or through the lens of her project. And today we're gonna look at lessons five through seven. So basically the next, uh, the next three lessons of those 10 key lessons. 0:01:34.8 AS: I can't wait. Let's do it. 0:01:37.3 JD: Let's do it. So lesson number five was: show enough data in your baseline to illustrate the previous level of variation. Right. So the basic idea with this particular lesson is that, you know, let's say we're trying to improve something. We have a data point or maybe a couple data points. We wanna get to a point where we're starting to understand how this particular concept works. In this case, what we're looking at is joy in learning. And there's some different rules for how many data points you should, should have in a typical base baseline. But, you know, a pretty good rule of thumb is, you know, if you can get 12 to 15, that's... That's pretty solid. You can start working with fewer data points in real life. And even if you just have five or six values, that's gonna give you more understanding than just, you know, a single data point, which is often what we're... What we're working with. 0:02:35.6 AS: In, other words, even if you have less data, you can say that this gives some guidance. 0:02:40.9 JD: Yeah. 0:02:41.1 AS: And then you know that the reliability of that may be a little bit less, but it gives you a way... A place to start. 0:02:46.9 JD: A place to start. You're gonna learn more over time, but at least even five or six data points is more than what I typically seen in the typical, let's say, chart where it has last month and this month, right? So even five or six points is a lot more than that. You know, what's... What's typical? So I can kind of show you, I'll share my screen here and we'll take a look at, Jessica's initial run chart. You see that right? 0:03:19.3 AS: We can see it. 0:03:21.2 JD: Awesome. 0:03:22.3 AS: You wanna put it in slideshow? Can we see that? Yeah, there you go. 0:03:24.9 JD: Yeah, I'll do that. 0:03:25.4 AS: Perfect. 0:03:26.3 JD: That works better. So, you know, again, what we're trying to do is show enough data in the baseline to understand what happened prior to whenever we started this improvement effort. And I think I've shared this quote before, but I really love this one from Dr. Donald Berwick, he said "plotting measurements over time turns out in my view to be one of the most powerful things we have for systemic learning." So what... That's what this is all about really, is sort of taking that lesson to heart. So, so you can look at Jessica's run chart for "joy in science." So just to sort of orient you to the chart. We have dates along the bottom. So she started collecting this data on January 4th, and this is for about the first 10 days of data she has collected. So she's collected this data between January 4th and January 24th. So, you know, a few times a week she's giving a survey. You'll remember where she's actually asking your kids, how joyful was this science lesson? 0:04:24.4 JD: Mm-hmm. 0:04:27.2 JD: And so this is a run chart 'cause it's just the data with the median running through the middle, that green line there, the data is the blue lines connected by, or sorry, the blue dots connected by the points and the y axis there along the left is the joy in learning percentage. So out of a hundred percent, sort

How do you know that the learning you and your colleagues are doing is leading to changes in behavior? In this episode, Bill and Andrew discuss little tests you can do to see if the transformation you're working toward is really happening. 0:00:02.0 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunity. Today is episode 22, and the title is, Test for Understanding Transformation. Bill, take it away. 0:00:30.7 Bill Bellows: Hey, we've been at this podcast for about a year now, right? 0:00:36.6 AS: It's incredible how long it's been. 0:00:39.8 BB: And in the beginning you said, I've been at this for 30 years, right? 0:00:43.7 AS: Yeah. [laughter] 0:00:46.7 BB: Maybe we should change that to 31. 0:00:48.3 AS: Oh, man, there you go. 0:00:51.2 BB: All right. 0:00:53.0 AS: That reminds me of the joke of the janitor at the exhibition of the dinosaurs and the group of kids was being led through the museum and their guide had to run to the bathroom. And so they were looking at this dinosaur and they asked the janitor, "How old is that dinosaur?" And he said, "Well, that dinosaur is 300,032 years old." "Oh, how do they know it so exactly?" He said, "Well, it was 300,000 when I started working here 30 years ago." [laughter] 0:01:28.8 AS: So there we are. 0:01:31.4 BB: That's great. 0:01:33.3 AS: Thirty-one years. 0:01:34.0 BB: All right, all right, all right. So first thing I wanna say is, as you know and our listeners know, I go back and listen to this podcast and I interact with people that are listening too, and I get some feedback. And in episode 19, I said the Germans were developing jet engines in the late 1940s. No, it turns out the Germans were developing jet engines in the late 1930s and they had a fighter plane with a turbine engine, a developmental engine in the late '30s. They didn't get into full-scale development and production. Production didn't start till the tail end of the war. But anyway, but I was off by a decade. In episode 21, I mentioned that checks were awarded within Rocketdyne for improvement suggestions and individuals who submitted this and it could be for an individual, maybe it was done for two people, three people, I don't know, but they got 10% of the annual savings on a suggestion that was implemented in a one-time lump sum payment. 0:02:36.1 BB: So you got 10% of the savings for one year and I thought, imagine going to the president of the company and let's say I walk into the president's office and you're my attorney. And I walk in and I say, "Hey, Mr. President, I've got a suggestion. You know that suggestion program?" He says, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Come on in, come on in. And who's this guy with you?" "Well that's Andrew Stotz." "And who's Andrew?" "He's my attorney, and he and I have been thinking about what this is worth." "Well, tell me about it." "No, well, before we get into it, we've got this form to sign here." 0:03:10.9 AS: Andrew. 0:03:11.1 BB: "Right? And you wanna see the idea or not? But we don't have to share it." But I thought, imagine people going to great length and really taking advantage of it. Well, a few of us that were involved in our InThinking Roadmap training, what we started to propose is we want a piece of the action, Andrew. So the proposal we had is that, Andrew, if you come to one of our classes, a study session on The New Economics or Managing Variation of a System, we'll have you sign a roster, right? And so if you are ever given a check for big numbers, Andrew, then we're gonna claim that our training contributed to your idea and all we ask is 10%, right? 0:03:58.1 AS: Of your 10%. 0:04:00.9 BB: I mean, I think that's fair, right? But imagine everybody in the organization becoming a profit center. 0:04:08.7 AS: Crazy. 0:04:10.4 BB: That's what you get. All right. 0:04:14.5 AS: And the lesson from that is focus on intrinsic motivation. People wanna make improvements, they wanna contribute. 0:04:23.8 BB: You start... You go down the slippery slope of incentives, which will be part of what we look at later. There's just no end to that. All right? 0:04:31.4 AS: Yeah. 0:04:32.2 BB: So I mentioned in a previous podcast that I had an interaction, met the army's first woman four-star general, and I just wanna give you some more background and interesting things that happened with her relative to this test for understanding transformation. I don't know April, May, 2008, someone on her staff reached out to me and when they first... When the guy got a hold of me, I said... From the Pentagon, he called me, I think it was like 8:00 or 9:00 o'clock at night here. Whatever it was, it was after hours in LA so it was after hours in DC. I remember saying to the guy, "How did you find me?" H

How can you make lasting change at your organization? Recruit your friends! In this discussion, Bill Bellows lays out his experience recruiting and working with a small group to make big changes in a large company. 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 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunity. Today is episode 21, and the topic is Transparency. Bill, take it away. 0:00:27.1 Bill Bellows: Thank you, Andrew, and welcome to our audience. And I wanna thank a handful of people who have reached out to me on LinkedIn and elsewhere to talk about the podcast, what they're getting out of it, and which has been very interesting meeting people from around the world. And that's led me to a couple opening remarks for clarity on some of the things we've discussed in the past. And then we'll get into our feature topic. And so I say, [chuckle] is that in my early years at Rocketdyne, the Rocket Factory, a few of us started to see the synergy of what we were absorbing and integrating from, primarily from Dr. Deming and Taguchi, not just them, there were others. And we're 10 years away from really beginning to see what Russ Ackoff was able to offer us. At one point, there were eight of us. It started off with one, then another, then another. Next thing you know there's eight of us. We were what Barry Bebb and his cloud model would call advocates. Advocates of a change, of a transformation. We've been using that word. And I started to refer to us as the Gang of Eight 'cause this is the early '90's. And I think in China there was a group known as the Gang of Eight. Maybe that was the '80's. And I remember thinking, "Oh, we're like the Gang of Eight." 0:01:54.7 AS: I thought that was a Gang of Four in China, is that the Gang of Four. 0:01:58.9 BB: Well, there was a Gang of Four, then there was a Gang of Eight. There were both. 0:02:02.4 AS: Okay. 0:02:03.1 BB: But anyway, but I remember hearing that word, and then I thought, "Well, so okay, a gang of eight." We started to meet regularly, perhaps every other week, sharing ideas on how to initiate a transformation and how we operated, again, inspired by Deming. So at first we met quietly, we would meet in another building, not wanting to call attention to our efforts, not wanting to be visible for those who might have been adversaries again to borrow from Barry's model. 'Cause Barry's model was, there's, for every advocate there's a few more adversaries. So we were keeping our heads down. And this is before I knew anything about Barry, but I, we were just kind, a little bit paranoid that people would see what we're doing. And so who were the ones that were the adversary? Well, those were promoting rewards and recognition. Those were promoting individual cash incentives for suggestion programs including, as I mentioned a previous podcast, an individual could submit a suggestion award, get up to 10% of the annual savings in a onetime lump sum. They were giving out checks for $10,000, Andrew. And I would kid people, if the company's giving out checks for $10,000, do you think we've got photographs of me receiving a check for 10,000? You betcha. 0:02:03.5 BB: And there it is in the newspaper, me receiving a check, not that me, [chuckle] but somebody receiving a check for $10,000, a big smile with the President. And it's in the newspaper and did that cause issues? Yes. But anyway, it wasn't obvious for some of us that we might have been, sorry, it wasn't obvious for some time that those we might have considered the adversary to our efforts were very likely not meeting to plan how to stall our efforts. [chuckle] Right. And, but it took a while to realize this, so here we are trying to be very discreet, meeting discreetly. And then it, at some time it dawned on me and some of the others that, those of us that were inspired to learn, think, and work together on transformation efforts as we've been exploring these podcasts, we have the benefits of positive synergy. And the adversaries at best operate without synergy as they're not likely to be inclined to do much more than participate in what some at Rocketdyne called, you ready, "Bill Bellows' Bitch Sessions." [laughter] And they come back from a class with me and they start bitching about me. And then the local people in that area would come by and tell me, and they said, "Anything we can do?" I said, "Yeah," I said, "Ask them what part of Rocketdyne moving in the direction of a Blue Pen Company do they not like." Right? It's just arrrgggggh. 0:02:04.2 BB: And I say, anyway. But once we had more and more results from our efforts, results from applying these ideas with very visible improvements in quality and costs leading to improved profits, it was all the harder for the

Can a 4th grade class decide on an operational definition of "joy in learning"? In part 4 of this series, educator John Dues and host Andrew Stotz discuss a real-world example of applying Deming in a classroom. This episode covers the first part of the story, with more to come in future episodes! 0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. This is episode four about goal setting through a Deming lens. John, take it away. 0:00:22.6 John Dues: Good to be back, Andrew. Yeah, we've been talking about organizational goal setting last few episodes. A couple episodes ago, we talked about those four conditions that organizations should understand prior to setting a goal. Then we sort of introduced this idea of trying to stay away from arbitrary and capricious education goals. And then we got into these 10 lessons for data analysis. And so what I thought we could do now is we've got that foundation in place is that we could take a look at an applied example in real classrooms of those 10 key lessons in action to kind of bring those alive. And I ran this project a few years ago with a teacher named Jessica Cutler. She's a fourth grade science teacher in our network. And she was going through something we call a Continual Improvement Fellowship. So we do this sort of internal fellowship where people can learn that sort of way of thinking, the tools, techniques, the theories related to the science of improvement. And then they actually take that right away and apply it to a problem in their classroom or their department or their school, depending on who it is. 0:01:55.0 JD: And so what Jessica was doing, what her project ended up being was she was trying to improve the joy in learning in her fourth grade science class. So it's interesting to see how that sort of project evolved. So I thought we could revisit each of the 10 lessons and how that lesson was applied in Jessica's improvement project. And we'll maybe get through three or four of the lessons today. And then over the course of the next few episodes, kind of get to all 10 lessons and think through how they were... How that went in her improvement project. 0:02:08.1 AS: Sounds like a good plan, practical application. 0:02:12.0 JD: Yeah. I mean, it was interesting too, because she didn't initially sort of consider joy as a possibility. She was thinking like, I'm gonna work on improving test scores or something like that was sort of her initial brainstorm. And then sort of pivoted to this when we kind of talked through what was possible from the Deming philosophy type of standpoint. So it's interesting to see how things evolve. But just to kind of revisit, so we talked through these 10 lessons. Lesson one was "data has no meaning apart from their context." So we talked about these questions that are important, like who collected the data? How was it collected? When was it collected? Where was the data collected? What are the values themselves represent? What's that operational definition for the concept under measurement? Have there been any changes to that operational definition as the project unfolds? And so even with a project with a teacher and her students, all of those questions are relevant. They're still important just because you're dealing with students that doesn't mean anything changes on that front. So it was important for her to sort of think through all of those things as she thought through the start of her project. 0:03:28.9 JD: And what her and her students came up with after they sort of decided that they were gonna focus on joy, they focused on this problem statement. And they were like, well, what do we want science class to look like? 'Cause that was sort of their starting point. And what her and her students...Oh sorry go ahead. 0:03:45.9 AS: One thing you started off talking about her, now you're talking about her students. So she got her students involved in this process. Is that what you're saying? 0:03:56.2 JD: Yeah. So they were working together from the very outset even... 0:04:02.0 AS: As opposed to a teacher talking through this with a principal or something in a faculty room and then thinking of how do I... Okay. 0:04:09.2 JD: Yep. That's right. Yeah. And so what they came up with is the sort of desired future state of science classes. "We are able to stay focused through science, enjoy science class and remain engaged." And so to give some context, what was happening is that she taught science and social studies and it was sort of like a back-to-back class period. And they would do science second. And so by the time they were doing science, sometimes the students were getting off task, disengaged. They weren't as engaged as either the students wanted to be or t

Dr. Deming developed his philosophy over time and in conversations with others, not in isolation. As learners, we tend to forget that context, but it's important to remember because no one implements Deming in isolation, either. In this conversation, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz discuss how there's no such thing as a purely Deming organization and why that's good. 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 discussions with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. Today is episode 20, entitled, System of Profound Wisdom. Bill, take it Away. 0:00:31.6 Bill Bellows: But not just for 30 years. I forgot to say I started when I was 12. 0:00:36.6 AS: Yes. [laughter] Yes. And you've got the hair to prove it. [laughter] 0:00:43.7 BB: All right. Now, actually, I was thinking the proposal and the title, I thought... I mean, System of Profound Wisdom is cool, System of Profound Questions. Either one of those is good. Let's see which title comes out. 0:00:57.6 AS: Yeah. And I think we'll have to also understand that may some listeners that may not even know what System of Profound Knowledge means, they've been listening. They do. But if today's their first episode, we also gotta break that down, just briefly. 0:01:10.9 BB: Yeah. Okay, let's do that. All right. Well, let me give an opening a quote from Dr. Deming from chapter three, and then we can explain this SoPK, System of Profound Knowledge, thing. But in chapter three of Dr. Deming's last book, The New Economics, the last edition, edition three, came out in 2018. And chapter three, Dr. Deming says, "We saw in the last chapter, we are living under the tyranny of the prevailing style of management. Most people imagine that this style has always existed. It is a fixture. Actually, it is a modern invention a trap that has led us into decline. Transformation is required. Education and government, along with industry, are also in need of transformation. The System of Profound Knowledge to be introduced in the next chapter is a theory for transformation." So you wanna... 0:02:15.4 AS: That's good. 0:02:16.7 BB: So let's say something. Let's just say something about SoPK. How would you explain that? 0:02:23.1 AS: Yeah. Well, actually, I wanna talk very briefly about what you just said, because it's just... 0:02:27.1 BB: Oh, sure. 0:02:29.6 AS: At one point, I thought, "It's a system of knowledge." But he just said it was a system of transformation. 0:02:38.7 BB: It's a theory for transformation. 0:02:40.1 AS: A theory for transformation. Okay, got it. I see. And one of the things that I... I look at Toyota so much just 'cause it's so fascinating and how they've survived all these years, the continuity in the business, the continuity and the profitability of the business, the continued march to become the number one auto producer in the world, and having faced all the ups and downs and survived. And I just think that what they have is a learning organization. No matter what the challenge is, they're trying to apply learning tools, like System of Profound Knowledge, like PDSA, to try to figure out how to solve this problem. And I think that many companies, including at times my companies, [chuckle] we sometimes will scramble and we'll lose knowledge and we won't gain knowledge. And so the System of Profound Knowledge, to me, is all about the idea of how do we build a base of knowledge in our business and then build upon that base of knowledge rather than destroy it when the new management comes in or when a new management idea comes in. 0:04:00.7 AS: And that's something I've just been thinking about a lot. Because I do know a company that I've been doing some work with, and they basically threw away a huge amount of work that they did on System of Profound Knowledge and stuff to go with the prevailing system of management, is like going back. And now, they just produced a loss in the first quarter, and I just think, "Interesting. Interesting." 0:04:27.6 BB: Well, a couple things come to mind based on what you said. One is I would propose that Toyota, I'm in agreement of "Toyota's a learning organization." And that'll come up later. I've got some other thoughts on learning organizations. And we know that they were influenced by Dr. Deming. To what degree, I'm not sure of. Shoichiro Toyoda, who is one of the sons of the founder of the Toyota Motor Car Company, was honored with a Deming prize in 1990. And I believe it came from JUSE, as opposed to the American Society for Quality. One or the other. He was honored with a Deming Prize. 0:05:32.0 AS: Yep. 0:05:33.5 BB: Again, I don't know if it's Deming Prize or Deming Medal. But I know he was honored. What's most important, the point I wanna make is, upon receivi

What happens if you transform HOW you think? In this episode, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz discuss the problem of thinking in one dimension at a time (as we were taught in school) and its impact on our ability to solve problems. BONUS: Book recommendations to broaden your understanding of Deming and more. 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 continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. The topic for today is, well, episode 19, Transforming How we Think. Bill, take it away. 0:00:29.9 Bill Bellows: And good evening, Andrew. 0:00:35.8 AS: Good evening. 0:00:36.2 BB: And, but just as a point of clarity, I view it as transforming how we think about our thinking. And that's what I've been focusing on for the, since the mid, the early '90s is not how we think, but what is our awareness of our thinking, and I think that ties in well with SoPK. So first in late breaking news, I am seeing with new eyes, Andrew. Literally, I've got new monofocal lenses in both eyes. The left eye three weeks ago, the right eye, a week ago. I was told about five years ago, eventually I'll have to have cataract surgery. And I spoke with a few friends who had it done, and they said, oh, it's easy. And what was so amazing was it was easier than they said. It was. 0:01:41.0 BB: But one neighbor who's had it done, and kind of a sad note is he claims, and I've not double checked this, he's a sharp guy. He claims 80% of the world's population would benefit from cataract surgery that they don't have access to and eventually go blind. And I don't know, I can believe, and he is in fact he's quoted me twice on that. But I am literally seeing with new eyes. The grays are now, shades of gray, are now shades of blue. When I look at the sky. My depth perception's a whole lot better. And so it ties in well with all this vision therapy stuff. So. 0:02:36.8 AS: Aren't you glad that those machines are high quality and the operations that they do are high quality? 0:02:41.6 BB: Oh, yeah. 0:02:42.4 AS: Just one little mistake on that one. And, that's... 0:02:46.2 BB: Well, and I'm signing the documents and there's a little bit of a flutter when I'm signing, in terms of the liability. And one friend's mom had a bad cataract procedure, so it doesn't always go. And I shared this with Kevin. Kevin's had the same, as likewise had the procedure done. And we shared the anxieties and then it worked out well. But yeah when I signed that form that there was in the event, and I thought, whoa, that'd be, anyway, it worked. All right, so where I want to pick up in episode 19 is where we left off with episode 18. And there near the end, I referenced from Dr. Deming. He says Dr. Deming says in chapter three of The New Economics, and he says, "we saw in the last chapter that we're living under the tyranny of the prevailing style of management. Most people imagine this style has always existed. It is a fixture. Actually," he said, "it's a modern invention, a trap that has led us into decline. Transformation..." 0:04:03.0 BB: You remember that word from last time? Okay. "Transformation is required. Education and government, along with industry are also in need of transformation. The System of Profound Knowledge will be introduced in the next chapter. To be introduced in the next chapter is a theory for transformation." So I've got some bullet points and I want to get into the additional chapters and references from The New Economics on Dr. Deming's use of the term transformation. 'Cause I think what he's talking about... SoPK is a theory for transformation. So I think it's just not enough to talk about SoPK without understanding how does that fit in with what Dr. Deming's talking about? 0:04:49.0 AS: And for the listeners who come out of the blue here, SoPK stands for the System of Profound Knowledge. 0:04:56.1 BB: Yes. And system then gets into elements and the four elements that Dr. Deming proposed in The New Economics, going back to the late '80s when he started to put these thoughts together. We need to think about the elements of Profound Knowledge are looking at things as a system and understanding of variation and appreciation of psychology. That's the people aspect. And then theory of knowledge, which gets into what he would explain as how do we know that what we know is so. So the one thing I wanted to bring up on the System of Profound Knowledge is conversations with Dick Steele. And a neat way of looking at the System of Profound Knowledge is to say, well, what if we were to look at some data points, one element, we look at variation, and we see some data the output of a process. 0:06:00.0 BB: We see it go up and down. Well, if that's the only element we have, then we can't ask wh

In part 3 of this series, John Dues and host Andrew Stotz talk about the final 5 lessons for data analysis in education. Dive into this discussion to learn more about why data analysis is essential and how to do it right. 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 23 and we're talking about goal setting through a Deming lens. John, take it away. 0:00:30.8 John Dues: It's good to be back, Andrew. Yeah, in this first episode of this four-part series, we talked about why goal setting is often an act of desperation. And if you remember early on, I sort of proposed those four conditions that organizations should understand about their systems prior to ever setting a goal. Those four were capability, variation, stability, and then by what method are you going to improve your system? And then in the last episode, I introduced the first five lessons of the 10 key lessons for data analysis. And remember, these lessons were set up to avoid what I call these arbitrary and capricious education goals, which are basically unreasonable goals without consideration of those four things, the system capability, variation, and stability, and then not having a method. So, it might be helpful just to recap those first five lessons. I'll just list them out and folks that want to hear the details can listen to the last episode. 0:01:31.8 JD: But lesson one was data have no meaning apart from their context. So, we've got to contextualize the data. Lesson two was we don't manage or control the data. The data is the voice of the process. So, it's sort of, you know, the data over time shows us what's happening and we don't really have control over that data. We do have control under that underlying process. Lesson three was plot the dots for any data that occurs in time order. So, take it out of a two-point comparison or take it out of a spreadsheet and put it on a line chart that shows the data over time. Lesson four was two or three data points are not a trend. So again, get beyond the typical two-point limited comparison this month and last month, this year and last year, this same month, last year, those types of things, this week, last week. 0:02:25.6 JD: And then lesson five was, show enough data in your baseline to illustrate the previous level of variation. So, we want to get a sense of how the data is changing over time and we need a baseline amount of data, whether that's 12 points, 15 points, 20 points, there's sort of different takes on that. But somewhere in that 12-to-20-point range is really the amount of data we want to have in our baseline. So, we understand how it's moving up and down over time sort of naturally. Sort of at the outset of those two episodes, we also talked about centering the process behavior charts, like the ones we viewed in many of our episodes. And we put those in the center because it's a great tool for looking at data over time, just like we've been talking about. 0:03:11.4 JD: And I think when we use this methodology, and when you start to fully grasp the methodology, you start to be able to understand messages that are actually contained in the data. You can differentiate between those actual special events, those special causes, and just those everyday up and downs, what we've called common causes. And in so doing, we can understand the difference between reacting to noise and understanding actual signals of significance in that data. And so, I think that's a sort of a good primer to then get into lessons six through 10. 0:03:51.2 AS: Can't wait. 0:03:53.3 JD: Cool. We'll jump in then. 0:03:56.1 AS: Yeah. I'm just thinking about my goal setting and how much this helps me think about how to improve my goal setting. And I think one of the biggest ones that's missing that we talked about before is by what method. And many people think that they're setting strategy, when in fact, they're just setting stretch targets with nothing under it. And they achieve it by luck or are baffled why they don't achieve it. And then they lash out at their employees. 0:04:31.4 JD: Yeah, there was really... I mean, that goes back to one of those four conditions of setting goal capability. You have to understand how capable your system is before you can set, it's fine to set a stretch goal, but it has to be within the bounds of the system. Otherwise, it's just maybe not an uncertainty, but a mathematical improbability. That's not good. Like you're saying, it's not a good way to operate if you're a worker in that system. So, lesson six then, to continue the lessons. 0:05:06.8 JD: So, lesson six is "the goal of data analysis in schools is not just to look at past results, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to look for

In this episode, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz discuss seeing organizations as holograms—3D images. Holograms show all parts from different views at once. Learn how using the lens of the System of Profound Knowledge lets you see the problems and opportunities for transformation. 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 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas, to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. The topic for today, which we call Episode 18, is, Wouldn't It Be Nice? Bill take it away. 0:00:28.9 Bill Bellows: Wouldn't it be nice if [chuckle] we were older and we wouldn't have to wait so long? Okay. So Episode 18, greetings, Andrew. So as I mentioned in the past, I like to go back and listen to the past previous podcasts and as well as hear from people and their feedback on them. And I have a few points of clarity on the last one, and then we'll get into today's feature. So the last one which we refer to as Diffusion From a Point Source. And I talked about being in a bathtub, you start off at room temperature water and, or you fill the bath and you went and got distracted and came back, and now it's not warm enough, so you crank up, let's add some more water, and you feel that heat coming towards you from the... And then the diffusion equation is about how that, all the water ends up about the same temperature, and then you turn off the water and you drop back to room temperature. 0:01:41.1 BB: But another aspect of the point source that I wanted to clarify is, is if you have in the bathtub some, a source of energy, a heat source, which is not, you know, is different than the source of the water coming out of the faucet. But imagine you've got a little generator in there pumping out heat, then the bathtub, depending on the temperature of that, the amount of energy being released, then the bathtub is going to get warmer, warmer and warmer and warmer and warmer and warmer, and what keeps it going back to room temperature is how much energy is coming out of that. And that's what I was referring to as what it takes to maintain a transformation either individually within an organization, is something which continues to churn. Else you end up by the world we're in, you're watching the news, you're hearing about some accident and people are looking for the singular source, or they're looking at two points in a row, a downturn or upturn and looking at two data points to draw a conclusion. So there's all these everyday reminders of how, of the prevailing system of management at work in terms of how people are treated, how we manage systems. And our challenge is, how do you fight that? 0:03:14.7 BB: And so even within your organization, if you're trying to get people excited by Deming's works, what you have to appreciate is when they go home, the rest of their lives, they're being immersed in a culture of blame of individuals, not the system, and that's part of what we have to deal with. So I just want to mention that what I meant by that source term is, what does it take individually that we can do within our organizations to try to keep things going and not get sucked back down, knowing you've got all this normality around us that we're trying to move beyond. So the next thing I want to talk about is transformation. [chuckle] And then as that leads into, Wouldn't It Be Nice. And I was looking at The New Economics, my Kindle version, and found out that there were 73 references to transform in The New Economics, 73. And the first one is in the forward written by our good friend Kevin Cahill, and in there Kevin references, this is in the 3rd edition of The New Economics, which is the white cover if you have it in print. And it came out 2018. In there, Kevin references Out of the Crisis. And Kevin says, "The aim of the book," again, Out of the Crisis, "was clearly stated in the preface." 0:04:48.1 BB: This from Dr. Deming now, "The aim of this book is transformation of the style of American management, transformation of American style of management is not a job of reconstruction nor is it revision, it requires a whole new structure from foundation upward. The aim of this book is to supply the direction." Okay? Now back to Kevin, then Kevin says, "Out of the Crisis supplies direction for any and all types of organizations, while many people focused on its application in manufacturing, it was a call to action for every organization from education, to healthcare, to non-profits and startups of all sizes." Okay. So now we get to the preface for The New Economics. And so this is from Dr. Deming, what I just shared with you is Kevin quoting his grandfather. So now going back to 1993, the 1st edition, Dr. Deming said, "The route to transformation is what I call Profound Knowledge.

Do you struggle to meet your goals or targets? Find out how you can change your thinking about goals and your process for setting them so you can keep moving forward. In this episode, John Dues and host Andrew Stotz discuss the first five of John's 10 Key Lessons for Data Analysis. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:03.0 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with 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 two of four in a mini-series on why goal setting is often an act of desperation. John, take it away. 0:00:32.3 John Dues: Hey, Andrew, it's good to be back. Yeah, in that last episode, that first episode in this mini-series, we talked about why goal setting is often an act of desperation and I basically proposed these four conditions that organizations should understand prior to setting a goal. So it's not the goals in and of themselves that are bad, but it's with this important understanding that's often lacking. So those four things that organizations should understand, one, what's the capability of a system under study? So that's the first thing, how capable is the system or the process? The second thing is what's the variation within that system or process under study? So that's the second thing we talked about last time. The third thing is understanding if that system or process is stable. And then the fourth thing was, if we know all of those things, by what method are we going to approach improvement after we set the goal, basically? So you gotta have those four things, understanding the capability of the system, the variation of the system, the stability of the system, and then by what method, prior to setting a goal. And so I think I've mentioned this before, but absent of an understanding of those conditions, what I see is goals that are, what I call it, arbitrary and capricious. 0:01:48.8 JD: That's a legal characterization. You look that up in the law dictionary. And it basically says that an "arbitrary and capricious law is willful and unreasonable action without consideration or in disregard of facts or law." So I'm just now taking that same characterization from a legal world and applying it to educational organizations and accountability systems, and I just switched it to "a willful and unreasonable goal without consideration or in disregard of system capability, variability, and/or stability." And we see these all over the place for education organizations, for schools, school districts, teachers, that type of thing. 0:02:31.6 JD: And so what I tried to do in the book and tried to do here in my work in Columbus is develop some sort of countermeasures to that type of goal setting and develop the 10 key lessons for data analysis. An antidote to the arbitrary and capricious goals seen throughout our sector. And this process behavior chart tool, looking at data in that format is central to these lessons. So what I thought we would do in this episode and the next is outline those 10 key lessons. So five today and then do another five in the next episode. And in the fourth episode of the series, what we would do is then apply those examples to a real life improvement project from one of our schools. It's helpful, I think too, to sort of, to understand the origin of the key lessons. So there's the lessons that I'll outline are really derived from three primary sources. 0:03:36.0 JD: So the first two come from Dr. Donald Wheeler, who I've mentioned on here before, a lot of Deming folks will, of course, have heard of Dr. Wheeler, who's a statistician in Tennessee, a colleague of Dr. Deming when Dr. Deming was alive and then has carried on that work to this day. The two books, two really great books that he wrote, one is called Understanding Variation, a thin little book, a good primer, a good place to start. And then he's got a thicker textbook called Making Sense of Data, where you get in really into the technical side of using process behavior charts. So I'd highly recommend those. And then the third resource is a book from a gentleman, an engineer named Mark Graban called Measures of Success. And I really like his book because he has applied it, the process behavior chart methodology, to his work and he's really done it in a very contemporary way. So he's got some really nice color-coded charts in the Measures of Success book and I think they're really easy to understand with modern examples, like traffic on my website, for example, in a process behavior chart, really easy to understand modern example. But all three of the books, all three of the resources are built on the foundation of Dr. Deming's work. They're, you know, Graban and Wheeler are fairly similar and I think Graban would say he's a student of Wheeler. 0:05:00.4 JD: He learned of this mindset, this approach to data a

In The New Economics, Deming said "The individual, transformed, will perceive new meaning to his life…" (3rd edition, page 63) But are we ever completely transformed? Discover why Bill Bellows believes that transformation is an ongoing process and how you can keep your learning journey going. 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 Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. And the topic for today is, in this episode 17, Diffusion from a Point Source. Bill, take it away. 0:00:29.6 Bill Bellows: And the title coincidentally, was the focus of my Master's thesis. We'll look at that later. 0:00:37.1 AS: It wasn't a rock and roll song. Yes, correct. 0:00:39.9 BB: No, not a rock and roll. [chuckle] Actually, Diffusion from a Point Source. Was that Mick Jagger or Keith Richards? Maybe it was Taylor. Maybe it was Taylor Swift. Okay. So some opening remarks, and then we'll get to today's feature. And I mentioned in the past, I go back and listen to the podcast, read through the transcripts, and it's very much like "Production Viewed as a System" - is to talk with people that have listened to it, listened to it myself and ask, have I... Are there holes in the explanation? Can I add some more clarity to it? The process I use for these podcasts is, some title comes to mind. I've got a long list that we started with at the very beginning, and then some other topics come up for any of a variety of reasons. 0:01:35.3 BB: And we'll have a title, have an outline, but then as we get involved in the conversation, something I say leads to something that you say leads to something that's not on the list. And sometimes some of those ad-libs, I go back and listen to and say, "Well, I don't know that sounded right. I just wanna add a little bit more clarity". Another thing I wanna say at the outset for those listening, is [chuckle] there is... Somebody posted somewhere on social media that one of the sessions was a total waste of time to listen to which I think is unfortunate. But what I like to say is, where I'm coming from to support The Deming Institute, as your ambition is as well, is to help individuals in respective organizations learn about Dr. Deming's ideas, try to apply them, deepen their understanding, explain them to others, and that's the target audience. 0:02:48.0 BB: So, for those who find that boring, well maybe this is not the podcast for you. And so, and the other thing I wanna say along those lines is, for the majority of my time at Rocketdyne, I had the responsibility of being a transformation agent or transformation person was part of my job. Now, I was brought in, I didn't have that job to begin with. The job I had to begin with was to lead the effort to provide training, facilitation of applications of Dr. Taguchi's ideas. And what I've shared in these podcasts is a lot of what I was doing early on was helping people put out fires. 0:03:38.2 BB: And that's not what Dr. Taguchi's ideas are about. His ideas are about improving the robustness of the performance of a product or service. Whereby what robustness Dr. Taguchi means is "it performs as an athlete incredibly well in spite of differing weather conditions." So the ability of a marathoner to run very consistent fast times in spite of the weather, in spite of the altitude. And so you're getting consistently high, or consistently faster and faster times. That's what Dr. Taguchi meant by, means by, his work means by "robustness." 0:04:16.2 BB: And what I was doing was using tools and techniques associated with his ideas to fight fires. And then, I got frustrated by that. And that led me to Dr. Deming's work, led me to revisit Dr. Deming's work. I had met him in 1990 and The New Economics came out in '93, and I had a couple of years of this frustration. The exciting thing was solving, getting involved, working with some really exciting people, and solving some very high visibility issues. But it wasn't breaking in as much as I would've liked into the, into the robustness piece. And when I came across Deming's work, I started to understand, it gave me a lot of food for thought as to why that might be the case. Now what is meant by transformation? And Dr. Deming uses that term, an individual transformed. 0:05:07.8 BB: And I had asked people that were close to him like, what is his operational definition of transformation? And when I explained it to them, I said, this is what I think he means this. And typically people say that's, they agree with that. And so my simple explanation of what I think Deming meant by transformation is as simple as, me saying to you, the professor to the student, "Andrew, how did you do on the exam?" Whereas I've said in the past, that makes me an observer o

Did Dr. Deming forbid setting goals? Dive into this discussion about healthy goal setting, learn why your process matters, and the four things you need to understand before you start on goals. This episode is the first in a 4-part series about goal setting. 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 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 21 and we're talking about goal setting through a Deming lens. John, take it away. 0:00:26.9 John Dues: Yeah, it's good to be back, Andrew. Yeah, 'tis the season for resolutions, I suppose, so I thought we could talk about organizational goal setting and sort of doing that through a Deming lens. And I was thinking about, at a recent district leadership team meeting, I put the following quote up on a slide. I said, "Goal setting is often an act of desperation." You got to watch people's faces when they see that. And to give some context, we're sort of updating our strategic plan at United Schools Network and my point in putting that on the slide as a part of strategic planning was to start a discussion on sort of what I think is healthy goal setting and how that's not typical to what I've seen across my career in schools, education organizations. 0:01:22.4 JD: And I wanted to provide a framework for the team so that anyone that's setting a goal as a part of the strategic planning process sort of had this sort of mindset as we're going through the goal setting process. I think that the typical reaction to that quote, at least in my experience, has been something like, "But I thought that goal setting was something that highly effective people or highly effective organizations do." And my basic argument is that I think that that's the intention, but it's rarely the case, whether that's individuals or organizations. And there's these, what I've come to sort of frame as four conditions that have to be met during the goal setting process. And without those, you kind of get fluff for a goal setting, probably more likely just completely disconnected from reality. I think... Yeah, go ahead. 0:02:22.5 AS: I just wanted to talk to everybody out there that's listening and viewing. I mean, I'm sure you're going through goal setting all the time and as we talk about, it's the beginning of the year right now, this is actually, we're recording this in mid-January of 2024. So it's like I've been working on what's our vision? What's our mission? What's our values? Where are we going? What is our goal? What is our long term goal? What is our short term goal? And I don't know about you guys, but for me, it gets a little confusing and round in circles sometimes and overwhelming, and then this whole idea about, that goal setting is often an act of desperation. It's like I've been working on this stuff for recently over the last week or so and then I just heard you say that and I was like, "Oh, I'm really interested to learn more." So let's go through those four conditions. 0:03:18.5 JD: Yeah, I'll get to those in a second. But I... So I'm not saying don't set goals necessarily. And people have that same reaction typically to that statement, but it's goal setting is often an act of desperation. So it's not the goal in and of themselves, but generally it's the process that you go about and the lack of sort of logic behind the goals that I'm talking about. And I know on these podcasts, many of my examples have sort of I've been banging on like State Department accountability systems and stuff like that. I'm going to continue to do that today but I think the same sort of errors happen at the school system level, at the individual school building level, at the individual teacher or principal level, it's just the stakes are higher when you're talking about states and countries, systems of education. 0:04:11.8 JD: But what I've seen is over the last two decades, certainly post-No Child Left Behind, what it seems like is that there's often these goals set and they're sort of, the targets are sort of chosen out of thin air. And then there's this whole accountability system built around those goals and then in the case of states, we then rate and rank school systems or schools based on how they perform in relation to those goals. And again, the same type of thing is happening at the school system level, at the school level but probably the state accountability systems is what most educators are familiar with when I'm talking about goals. And in Ohio, like a lot of states, we give state tests, we give them third through eighth grade. 0:04:58.5 JD: They take reading and math every year, third through eighth grade in Ohio and you have to hit this 80% benchmark in terms of the percent of kids that are proficient in your school to meet the state standa

"The Cloud" is a metaphor for the top level of corporate authority - the CEO, CFO, CTO and maybe some Vice President positions. And if you're trying to transform an organization, your ideas need to penetrate the Cloud - but how? In this episode, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz talk about influencing others with the aim of transformation. 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 Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. Today is episode 16, and the title is, Get Off of My Cloud. Bill, take it away. 0:00:29.5 Bill Bellows: Hey. Hey, hey. [laughter] Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, get Off of My Cloud. Yeah. Alright, so here we are, 2024. So before we get to the Cloud, some opening remarks. And in particular looking at session 15, which is soon to be released. And one thing I... What I tell people is, what's exciting about understanding Deming's work is how revealing, how you see the world differently, and Dr. Deming used the metaphor of a lens. But it's not only what you see, but what you hear. 0:01:19.5 AS: Right. 0:01:22.3 BB: And, and I tell people I can go into an organization and within a few minutes between what I see and what I hear, I can get a pretty good sense, is it a ME or WE organization. And we think back to the comment I shared in episode 15 where the Boeing executive said, "Let's be honest," to the room full of 300 plus internal audit people who just do great, great work. 0:01:54.4 BB: I mean, if they didn't do great work, why would they be there? Everyone in our organization does great work, otherwise, why would they be around? But when they said to them, "Let's be honest, we don't make the airplanes." And I thought, that's right up there with my wife saying to me, "Look at what your son did." 0:02:22.4 BB: My son? Or is it, look at what our son did. Another giveaway expression is, we're gonna do a root cause analysis or RRCA, which is Relentless Root Cause Analysis. Well, every, and from a Deming perspective, instead of talking about a root cause, we can say there's root causes, and there's... They're dozens, hundreds of root causes, or sorry, common causes, common causes. And then every now and then there's a special cause. 0:03:01.0 BB: But even when a special cause appears so does a bunch of common causes. So from a Deming perspective there's never a root cause. So I... One poke I have for people that like to think in terms of root cause, 'cause they have this sense of, you can explain everything by a series of connected root causes. This cause leads... It's like the five whys. That this leads to this leads to this. But it's always, this leads to that, this leads to, and it's singular strands. And I think of it like a strand of spaghetti and everything is along some pathway. And I thought, no, that's not the model Deming had in mind. Deming had in mind a multitude of strands that are all woven together that you can't... What comes out is a bunch of contributions, not just one thing. So my poke at people like to believe in root cause phenomenon is, "If life can be explained by a series of root causes, then why do you need two parents? Why isn't it a single parent?" Sorry. 0:04:18.9 BB: I just finished the fifth cohort at Cal State Northridge in a eight-week class as part of an 18-month program where the students, we start with about 30, by the time it gets to me there may be 24 or so. And one course after another, after another, it's a very rigorous program. And I do a class called Seminar in Quality Management. And I love at the beginning of the course when I ask them about, if all the beads are red, if all the red beads are eliminated, can improvement, can still go on to, all those things we've talked about in this program. And I have them write essays on it, and it's so neat to see where they are in the beginning and where they are at the end. 0:05:07.1 BB: And in the beginning they'll be talking about human error. And so every time I see human error, I just write back, is it human error or is it system error? And one student in the class commented at the end of the course of what she learned, she said, No one had ever pointed that out to her. And she distinctly remembers the very first time I said that it was like, but wait a minute. And then it made more and more sense and I thought, yeah, I mean not... Is there such a thing as a human error? Well, Deming would say that 94 plus percent comes from the system. Another cute story, I used to host a monthly conference call for 17 years, every month for 17 years. 0:06:02.0 AS: Wow. 0:06:02.8 BB: And featured on the call was a thought leader, Russ Ackoff did it four years in a row. He became the January thought leader. And generally it was random, different people.

What does it mean to "commit" to transformation? What does "transformation" mean? In this episode, John Dues and host Andrew Stotz discuss Point 14 of Dr. Deming's 14 Points for Management - with John's interpretations for educators. 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 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 20, and we are continuing our discussion about the shift from management myths to principles for transformation of school systems. John, take it away. 0:00:31.1 John Dues: Hey, Andrew. It's good to be back. Yeah, we're on principle 14 today, which is Commit to Transformation. So I'll just start by outlining the principle itself. So Commit to Transformation - "clearly define top management's commitment to continual improvement of quality and its obligation to implement the 14 principles, plan and take action to put everyone in the organization to work to accomplish the transformation. Transformation is everyone's job. Start with education for all and positions of leadership." So, basically, we've been through these 14 principles, and the final one is, put it into action, basically. So I think a good place to start is just remembering or recalling what does Deming mean by transformation? And he's saying transformation is a change in state from one thing to another. So we're going from one thing to something completely new, and there's these 14 principles that help us get us there. 0:01:34.9 JD: And of course, when Deming was talking, he was talking about the prevailing system of management and changing into this new system of management and about this sort of, older version, this prevailing style from 30 years ago, which still is the prevailing style today. He said something that was really interesting. He said, it's a modern invention that cedes competition between people, teams, departments, students, schools, universities. And so when... What he is really saying is that when you transform your organization, you work together as a system. And he is advocating for cooperation and transformation. And I think of course, people are gonna say, yes, absolutely, we need to cooperate. And that's, that's the way that everybody wins. But in reality, I think that's not always what's happening in organizations because I think what you need in order to go about this switch is what Deming called Profound Knowledge. 0:02:41.5 JD: And most people don't have an understanding of, of what that is. So what happens I think is that the prevailing style of management, it's rooted in those management myths we've talked about before we started the principles. And it's sort of this false foundation for your organization. But that's where I think most people, people are. And so part of this commitment is then if we're gonna commit to transformation, there's some things that leaders have to realize, and then there's some steps you have to take if you're gonna sort of go down this path. I think the things that you have to realize as a leader, and these are things that are true for me as I continue this process and my organization is number one, there's gonna be a struggle. There's gonna be this struggle over every one of the 14 principles because it's so different from what we're doing today. 0:03:39.1 JD: I think another thing we're gonna have to realize is that this can't be one or two people at your organization. The entire leadership structure at your organization, it's gonna have to be educated in this new way of thinking, and then you're gonna have to bring along the entire organization. And this can be a challenge because if you are the person doing this at your organization, you very well may be fairly new to this new way of thinking, this new philosophy yourself, unless you've brought in someone externally to help you through this. And even if you do that probably for a good portion of the time, you're gonna have to be leading this before you may be feeling like an expert yourself. And that was definitely true in my case. But I think the emphasis in this initial introduction is that you gotta get that system's view and you have to help people understand the theory of variation. 0:04:43.0 JD: So that has to be sort of initial part of that introduction. And then of course, you have to take your organizational context into account and so how this sort of rolls out or plays out, it's certainly gonna vary by size of organization, by organizational type. But the good thing is, is regardless of size or type of organization, industry, sector, whatever, Dr. Deming offered several steps to get started in this process. So I think maybe as a start to how you commit to the transformation, if you wanna go down this route, it might be helpful to sort of outline those steps

In this episode, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz talk about where and how to start using your new knowledge when you're learning Deming. 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 continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. The topic for today in episode 15 is Start Where You Are. Bill, take it away. 0:00:25.0 Bill Bellows: Thank you, Andrew. And for our audience, you may notice there's a different background. This is not a green screen. This is actually a bedroom at my in-laws in upstate New York. Hey, Andrew, I've been listening to some of the podcasts, and I've collected some data on each of them. Would you like to see it? 0:00:53.0 AS: Yeah, definitely. 0:00:54.2 BB: I've got a control chart, I've got a control chart for each of the 14 sessions for how many times I say, holy cow. 0:01:02.9 AS: Holy moly. 0:01:04.4 BB: In each episode. Yeah, and the process is stable. [laughter] So I say holy cow, I think the average is 2.2, and the upper control limit is... I'm just kidding. 0:01:25.4 AS: You're a sick man. 0:01:27.7 BB: But I think outside of this podcast, I don't know if I use that expression. And I don't know where it comes from, I just, it must be... 0:01:37.7 AS: Did you grow up around cows? You said you're near where you grew up. 0:01:44.4 BB: Yeah, I am staying at my wife's sister's place. And my wife's father, when I met her, had cows in his backyard. And we used to chase the cows. When they got out, we would chase them. And let me tell you, they move fast. [laughter] And I came down several times, severe cases of poison ivy, trying to herd this one cow that was always escaping. And I thought, oh, I'll tell my father, let me go out and I can scare this cow back. Now, no the cow got the best of me. I got covered with mud and went home with poison ivy. Those things, they move fast. So that's my only personal experience with cows. [laughter] 0:02:33.5 AS: Did the cows ever go to a nearby church? 0:02:38.9 BB: No. 0:02:39.2 AS: To become holy. 0:02:40.1 BB: That's a good point? I don't... Yeah, how do those words tie together? I don't know. 0:02:43.4 AS: I don't know. 0:02:45.4 BB: I have to go find out who I got that from. So what I thought we'd talk about today is this, Start Where You Are, Start Where You Are. And first share where I... One context for that expression was the first time I saw Russ Ackoff speak, well, first where I met Russ. I had seen him speak before at a Deming conference, but I didn't get a chance to talk with him. But I saw him a few years later, and he was doing a one-day program in Los Angeles as part of a management series that he would do around the country. And there are about, I don't know, 150 people in the room, 25-30 from across Boeing sites in Southern California that I had invited. And at the end of the day, with about an hour to go, Russ says, okay, I'm going to give you a break. I'm going to give you time to formulate some questions and we'll spend the last hour discussing wherever you want to go. Well, I took the time to go up to Russ and ask him a couple of questions. I had met him earlier in the day. He knew that most people in the audience were there from across Boeing and that I had arranged them. 0:04:06.3 BB: And so I had a chance to talk with him. So I went up and said, I said I've got two questions for you that are not relevant to the audience, but I'd like to ask you one-on-one. He said, sure, go ahead. Well, no, I said knowing that you've known Dr. Deming for, since the early '50s, I said, over that period of time, what do you think he would say he learned from you that would stand out? And vice versa, what did you learn from him over those years that you would say stands out? And he looks at me and he says, well, I don't, I don't know what he learned from me. Then he says, then he answers the question and he says, he says, I think Ed, and he liked to say Ed, 'cause he liked to brag that, yeah, everybody calls him Dr. Deming. I call him Ed. I've known him since 1950. 0:05:05.2 BB: But Russ, by the comparison, if I ever introduced him to you as Dr. Ackoff, he would say, Andrew, call me Russ. So he says, relative to what he learned, what Dr. Deming learned from him, first he says, "well, I don't know what he learned from me. But I think his understanding of systems is very implicit and I helped him develop a better explicit understanding." And I think that makes a lot of sense. I think Dr. Deming's understanding of systems is a lot of what he talks about in The New Economics is what he learned from Russ. It's a very, I think you know when Dr. Deming shared the Production as a Viewed as a System that flow diagram in 1950, he always talks about systems, what comes around, goes aro

What's the difference between education and training? Why is the distinction important? How does the Deming lens offer a new perspective on teacher effectiveness? In this episode, John Dues and host Andrew Stotz talk about why it's important to go beyond skills training and encourage education for personal growth. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:00.0 Andrew Stotz: Here we go. 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 19 and we're continuing our discussion about the shift from management myths to principles for the transformation of school systems. John, take it away. 0:00:31.2 John Dues: Andrew, good to be back. Yeah, principle 13 today, Institute a Vigorous Program of Education. I'll just start by reading the Principle, "Institute a vigorous program of education and encourage self-improvement for everyone. The school system needs not just good people, but people that are improving with education. Advances in teaching and learning processes will have their roots in knowledge." It's interesting, when I was reading about sort of this particular principle, Dr. Deming took this actually pretty far when he was asked where would you draw the line? And he basically said, I would allow any educational pursuits that people are interested in. So that was his sort of take on this particular principle. But I think it's maybe the first thing is to differentiate between training and education. When he was talking about those things, we talked about instituting training on the job back when we talked about principle six, and he basically said the training is for a skill and a skill is something that's finite because it ends when performance has reached a stable state for a person when thinking about that particular skill. 0:01:51.3 JD: The differentiator with Principle 13 is that it's focused on education and it's meant for growth. And in the Deming philosophy, this is sort of a never ending process of education. So skills, so training is focused on skills, whereas education is focused on knowledge and theory. And this is really an important distinction in my mind, and you need both, training and education are complimentary components I think of an effective school system or really an effective organization in general. So I think, I mean, obviously training is important. It's something that's necessary, especially when you come into a new job. We have lots of new teachers that come to us 'cause we're a relatively young organization. And it's pretty typical for these new teachers to come even if they majored in education many times, they don't have sort of the basic classroom management skills, the basic lesson planning skills, the basic lesson delivery skills that they need to be successful in the classroom. 0:03:00.9 JD: So we have a training program, and in the absence of that training program the teachers would probably flounder or it would take a lot longer time to get their legs under them. So training is important, but we have to sort of shorten that runway. So we have to be good at training 'cause we're like a relatively young organization and we have students that come to us on average that are below grade level. And so they can't wait a long time for these sort of teachers to get up to speed. And I think we've talked about the fact that we have this sort of three week training program before the school year starts for new teachers for that reason. And so training is obviously important, very important. But I think what I've sort of come to appreciate is this idea of... And Deming stressed this, that leaders, systems leaders understand this idea of a stable system. 0:04:00.7 JD: One of the things that he said was that "The performance of anyone that can learn a skill will come to a stable state upon which further lessons will not bring improvement of performance." And this for me, reading Deming at this point in my career was really an interesting revelation because for many years I had heard sort of policymakers, education reform types sort of lament the fact that teachers improvement largely levels off in about year five of their career. Now, there has been some more recent longitudinal teacher research in terms of effectiveness over time. And basically people have found that that's not quite true. And that teaching experience is positively correlated with student achievement gains sort of across the teacher's career. But it's definitely true that the gains and effectiveness are steepest in those initial years. 0:04:55.2 JD: And so when you put those two ideas together that there's sort of this leveling off in about year five with Deming's sort of concept of stable systems, it really sort of dawned on me that it was this perfect explanation for this phenomenon. Whe

How do grading systems, teacher ratings, school rankings, and other programs like those create barriers to learning? Should we eliminate them entirely, or do they have their place? John Dues and host Andrew Stotz talk about how to preserve joy in learning. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz. I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. This is episode 18, and we're continuing our discussion about the shift from management myths to principles for the transformation of school systems. John, take it away. 0:00:31.3 John Dues: Good to be back, Andrew. In this episode, we're doing the 12th principle. So we're on 12 of 14, remove barriers to joy in work and learning. So that's a certainly a concept that we've talked about, but I'll start by just reading the principle. "Principle 12, remove barriers that rob educators and students of their right to joy in work and learning. This means working to abolish the system of grading student performance, the annual rating of staff and accountability rating systems for schools and school systems. The responsibility of all educational leaders must change from sheer numbers to quality." There's two really great quotes I like from Deming. One on joy in learning where he says, "Our schools must preserve and nurture the yearning for learning that everyone is born with. Joy in learning comes not so much from what is learned, but from learning." 0:01:24.4 JD: And then for joy in work, he says, "Joy in the job comes not so much from the result, the product, but from contribution to optimization of the system in which everybody wins." So he is saying basically the same thing in those two quotes, but he is talking about the contributions to the process is where the joy comes from, not necessarily the outcome. And so much of the time, we're focused on the outcome, be it the work product in a work setting or the test scores perhaps in a, in a school setting. But he's really talking about what is that process that you're contributing to? And, and you know, how do you feel because of that, those contributions you're making? I think whether you're talking about joy in work or joy in learning, sort of unifying theme in principle 12 as it's, this concern with the pride of workmanship, whether that's the workmanship of making a product or in the learning that you're doing or something you're doing as a result of that learning, like a report or a poem that you've written or whatever. 0:02:31.6 JD: And so I think as a result, it's barriers that get in the way of joy in work and learning. And you know, maybe one of the most important obstacles to improvement of the quality of our education systems in the United States. And you know, just like, sort of, it says in the outline of the principle, there's really sort of three levels that these barriers exist at. You got the students and the grading of students. And then you have oftentimes some type of rating system, evaluation system for teachers, for principals, perhaps sometimes those rating systems use test scores or other similar metrics. And then that third level is, you have the actual schools or school districts themselves that are being rated within these state accountability systems. So you sort of have, you know, these three levels. And then there's this common problem at all three levels, regardless of which one. And that's basically this thing that we've talked about repeatedly, where you under-appreciate the contribution of the system to the performance of the people, whether you're talking about students, teachers or, or you know, school systems. So I thought that's where we could focus today. 0:03:49.8 AS: Yeah, you know it strikes right at the heart of everything that we believe, as particularly as Americans, but certainly spreading that around the world, that it's all about measuring, ranking, tracking. You know, when a parent puts a kid in school, what do they want to know? What was their grades? When a student's in trouble, it's 'cause of grades. And what a student wants to know, like everybody wants to know and rely on grades. So it's just so, it's so difficult. You know, I was talking with someone else talking about why Dr. Deming's philosophy hasn't been adopted as as widely as you'd hope. And I think it's part of, it's just because it's just sacred, the sacred heart of everything that we believe. And if you can measure it, you can track it, you can feed that back and give it to people and show them where they are and you deserve where you are based upon your efforts, and you've gotta move yourself from there. That is so ingrained. And I'm just curious, like what's the hope from your side that this can be seen. I think it can be seen if you stop and look, but it's so hard to implement.

Many businesses equate "manager" with "leader," excluding potential leaders from across the organization. In this episode, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz talk about leadership in Deming organizations - with a great story about senior "leaders" making a huge error in judgment at a conference of auditors. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.0 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. The topic for today, episode number 14, is Beyond Management by Extremes. Bill, take it away. 0:00:29.7 Bill: Number 14 already, Andrew. 0:00:32.0 AS: Incredible. 0:00:32.6 Bill: It's a good thing we skipped number 13. That's an unlucky number. [laughter] 0:00:37.0 AS: Not in Thailand. It's a lucky number. [laughter] 0:00:40.6 Bill: No, we didn't skip number 13. This is 14. 0:00:42.1 AS: Yes, we didn't. 0:00:43.5 Bill: Alright, so I just enjoy going back and listening to all of our podcasts, once, twice, three times. And then I talk with friends who are listening to them. And so I'd like to start off with some opening comments and then we'll get into tonight's feature, today's feature. 0:01:00.9 AS: So let's just, to refresh people's memory, episode 13, which we just previously did, was Integration Excellence, part two. 0:01:09.2 Bill: Yes. And that's what we called it. [laughter] So... [laughter] So last week I... When we thought about getting together, but I had the wrong time, and it worked out well in my schedule. Last week, Andrew, I did three presentations. A two-hour lecture for Cal State Northridge, which is part of a master's degree program, where I do a class in quality management. That was Tuesday night. Wednesday morning I did a one-hour presentation with one hour of conversation afterwards with the Chartered Quality Institute, which is kind of like the American Society for Quality in the UK, and this... So this was several hundred people from the UK and also the Caribbean chapter from Trinidad Tobago, Jamaica. And so there's a bunch there. And then on Thursday morning I did a three hour session for a group in Rotterdam, which was really early for me and late afternoon for them. 0:02:25.4 Bill: And in all three, I covered similar material for all three groups, which included the trip report that we've done on the ME Versus WE, how did you do on the exam? How did we do? And so it was really neat to present that to the three. And in each case, when I threw out the question, "how did you do on the exam?" And then explained as I did one of our earlier podcasts that if you've got a long list of inputs, which includes - the woman I was talking to and, 'cause I said to her, the question is how did you draw on the exam? What are the inputs? And she said, the inputs are, my energy, my enthusiasm, my commitment that she got stuck. And I said, have other students helped you? And she said, yes, other students have helped you. I said, that's another input. 0:03:17.3 Bill: I said, given that input, how many can you see? And she said, oh my gosh. She said, my professor, my parents, my brother. And then all of a sudden there was this long list of inputs that she couldn't see. And so I explained that to the people and then say, "if you've got that long list of inputs and the original question is, how did you do on the exam? Does that long list of inputs change the question or are you okay with that question?" And what I look for is, and what we've talked about is, does the whole idea, how did we do on the exam jump out at you? No, it doesn't jump out. So, in each case, I said, here's the situation, might you reframe the question? And in all three situations, most of them that I asked said, there's essentially nothing wrong with the question. And if they did restate the question, they kept the "you," "do you think you could have done better?" Do you think... And that's what's so cool is that they just hold onto the you. Well, and for one of the groups it came a... It was kind of like what I was saying was semantics. 0:04:32.6 Bill: And I said this is not semantics. I said, there's a big difference between somebody, you know referring to our kids as my son and my daughter and our son and our daughter. And this, "my," is singular ownership, "our" is joint ownership. And so what I was trying to explain is that, saying "How did you do versus how did we do?" is the difference between being an observer of your learning if you were the student, Andrew and a participant. Those are not... Those are enormous differences. It's not, just, it's not just a simple change in pronouns. And so when I... And when I got to next, I was at a meeting years ago, I was at the annual, you ready Andrew? I was at Boeing's Annual Auditor's Conference. 0:05:40.5 AS: Sounds exciting.

Who wins when teams and team members compete with each other? In this final episode in the Role of a Manager in Education series, David Langford and Andrew Stotz discuss why cooperation beats competition, particularly in schools. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.5 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today we continue our discussion of Dr. Deming's 14 items that he discusses in The New Economics about the role of a manager of people after transformation. And we're talking about the 14th of these different 14 items. And this one I want to read out, it is, "He understands the benefits of cooperation and the losses from competition between people and between groups." We decided to title this one: "Do you think you're winning from competition?" David, take it away. 0:00:53.7 David Langford: That sounds great. Great. It's good to be back again, Andrew. 0:01:00.4 AS: Yeah. 0:01:00.6 DL: Yeah. This is a great point, and it really is the basis for Deming's philosophy about everything that he brought to management and it got people to think differently. When I would give seminars with educators around the world and stuff, and we'd start talking about the differences between competition and cooperation, I'd often get people speaking very strongly that, "Competition is the way the world works and you have to have competition to get people to do stuff. And sports teams are always competing." And when you start to think about it, sports teams that, that usually have a sole focus of just beating the, the other team, generally don't have multi-year winning streaks, [chuckle] because you're not building a program, you're not building a whole philosophy, a whole basis to how you do things. 0:02:06.0 DL: And I've made it a point to really listen to all kinds of interviews with coaches over time. And one common theme I usually hear over and over and over from really good teams is they'll talk about the next game that they're playing. They don't talk so much about, "We're gonna beat these people." They talk about, "This will be a really good test for us." Or they'll say something about, "We're probably gonna really learn a lot this weekend [chuckle] at this game." Well, to me, those are really good coaches because they're lowering the fear level, they're lowering the anxiety. And the better we... The irony of this statement, this point number 14, is the better you cooperate, the better you compete. [chuckle] 0:03:04.0 DL: And when you're not doing that, you potentially could just go down in flames. And the same thing happens in a classroom. If you set up a classroom so everybody's competing against each other, or what Deming called the artificial scarcity of top marks, you'll end up with a whole bunch of people that are just basically at each other's throats, not cooperating, not getting along. You'll have all kinds of discipline problems and behavior problems and things that are going on in classrooms like that because it's all just set up on a competition level. So grading on a curve is a scarcity, artificial scarcity of top marks. So if there can only be three top marks or three A's or whatever it might be in this class, and people that are actually struggling in the class and actually trying to learn, they're gonna quickly learn, "There's no point in me actually trying because there's no way I'm ever going to get to that point. There's only gonna be three people that are gonna get the A." 0:04:14.2 DL: And that's the biggest thing about this, is getting to the point where you're understanding the losses of setting up artificial competition for, whether it be grades or points on a soccer field, or whatever it might be. Deming often used the analogy of the difference between a bowling team and a orchestra in terms of cooperation. So people that go bowling, they're generally just out for your own score and whatever you're trying to work through, and it's not really a team activity. Even if you're on a bowling team, it's still... You're just doing your own thing and doing your own score. 0:05:07.8 DL: So they have a very low level of interdependence in that environment. But I used to be a band teacher and orchestra leader and things like that. And so when Deming used the analogy of an orchestra about that being the pinnacle of interrelationships, it really struck home for me that like he said, "A 1OO people in an orchestra or a band, they're not there to compete [chuckle] who can play the loudest or who could play the biggest solo or... " Right? 'Cause that'd be a terrible thing to listen to if you went to a concert like that. 0:05:47.3 DL: But the reason we give people standing ovations, is because we recognize the interdependence and the cooperation it take

What are unhurried conversations, and why should managers prioritize them? In this episode, David Langford and host Andrew Stotz talk about the kinds of conversations managers should be having with their team members. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.5 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today, we continue our discussion of Dr. Deming's 14 items that he discusses in The New Economics about the role of a manager of people after transformation. In the third edition, that's page 86. And in the second edition, that's page 125. So we are talking about item number 13, and in that point, I wanna read it to you. It says, "Number 13, he will hold an informal unhurried conversation with every one of his people at least once a year, not for judgment, merely to listen. The purpose would be development of understanding of his people, their aims, hopes and fears. The meeting will be spontaneous, not planned ahead." We're calling today's conversation the unhurried conversation. David, take it away. 0:01:17.5 David Langford: Thank you, Andrew. It's good to be back again. So always fun to discuss these points and talk about the depth of what it means and how to work through that. So once again, this all sounds really simple. You know, hey, just have this unhurried conversation with people at least once a year. When I talked to Dr. Deming about this years ago, he was recommending more like once a quarter, if you can do that, to work that through. But what are we really talking about? So in this world of managing with data and KPIs, key performance indicators and, you know, holding people's feet to the fire and really making them toe the line and all that kinda stuff, Deming is sort of just pretty much kind of the opposite. Those things all have their place and time, but that's not the kind of conversation that he's hinting at here or he's talking about here. 0:02:24.4 DL: I find it really interesting that he says, you know, it shouldn't be... The meeting will be spontaneous and not planned ahead. And so what he's getting at is that you're not, you're now coming in with an agenda for what you wanna hear from somebody. And on the opposite side, as an employee or somebody that you're working with, they're not prepared with some kind of an agenda where they're telling you what they think they... Where they're telling you what they think you want to hear, kind of thing. And I think that's what he is talking about why it needs to be spontaneous. He also goes deeper and he talks about, you know, find out people's aims and hopes and their fears and what's happening. And I was just thinking about that movie The Intern where the guy is hired in the company and he is 80 years old, and so they're doing the interview with him. And this young kid asked him the question, where do you see yourself in five years? I think, he looks at it and says, "You mean when I'm 85?" So, different... 0:03:47.4 AS: Dead. 0:03:48.1 DL: Yeah. Different points of life, different ways to think about it. So yeah. But he's just talking about, hey, just set up a time, be spontaneous, come in, sit down with somebody, and just not necessarily talking about business. Right? What are your hopes and fears and where do you see us going? And do you think we're on the right track? And... 0:04:13.2 AS: I'm curious, why do you think that... I mean, in some ways it seems like such an obvious thing. Why do you think he even needed to say this? 0:04:18.7 DL: Because it's not happening and it's even even worse today, I think, than in Deming's time in the 1990s when all this, all the computer technology, KPIs, all that stuff was just coming into being. Well, nowadays, it's sort of just a way of life to have all that kind of stuff. And I, I hate the phrase about being data managed or managing with data or data-driven. That's what it is. Well, we're a data-driven school district, and we make all of our decisions. Well, there's a lot of problems with that, just the word "driven" kind of drives people a little bit crazy about stuff. And really, the data is just there just to be informed. So you could still make informed good decisions, but I think Deming even talked about if you just make decisions just based on the data, you're probably gonna go out of business because you're not really paying attention to the people and what's really going on in the organization, what's happening and that type of thing. 0:05:34.4 DL: So it can also be really intimidating if you're the boss, and you're just popping in and saying, hey, you got a few minutes, you wanna sit and talk for a while? Because especially if you're in an organization where you've always... Or your predecessor, or you've always had an agenda for that meeti

Quotas, arbitrary targets, work standards with numerical goals - these don't seem to apply to schools. But, as John Dues and host Andrew Stotz discuss, quotas show up a lot in classrooms, causing harm and preventing improvement. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. This is episode 17, and we are continuing our discussion about the shift from management myths to principles for the transformation of school systems. John, take it away. 0:00:34.3 John Dues: It's good to be back, Andrew. Yeah we've been working our way through these 14 Principles for Systems Transformation. Last week or last episode we did eliminate slogans and exhortations. And so we're on to principle 11, which is Eliminate Arbitrary Numerical Targets. So I'll start with the overview. So principle 11, eliminate arbitrary numerical targets in the form of work standards that prescribe quotas for teachers and numerical roles for people in management, substitute leadership in order to achieve continual improvement of quality and productivity. And the first thing I wanted to start with was just this really powerful Deming quote on quotas. In Out of the Crisis, he said, "A quota is a fortress against improvement of quality and productivity totally incompatible with never-ending improvement." I just love that quote because it's just such a forceful pushback in the other direction. It's a fortress against improvement. There's really no gray area there in that quote. 0:01:43.0 AS: It's not a fort, it's not a barrier, it is a fortress. 0:01:48.2 JD: Fortress. It kind of brings together a mental image in your mind when you hear fortress, a fortress against quality, a fortress against improvement. So why did he say that? One of the things that's interesting is, especially thinking about work standards that prescribe some type of quota for teachers, it's like, well, when you think of a quota, you typically think of a worker and some type of production facility. And that, of course, is largely what Deming was talking about with his Point 11 'cause he was doing a lot of work in manufacturing and that type of setting. However it does, like all of this stuff, it translates into education. And, you know, so that's why I decided to keep Principle 11 'cause it does show up in different ways in the classroom setting. And I think examples are really good because when I initially read this quote and I was thinking, well, how do quotas show up in a classroom setting? 0:02:40.5 JD: And I thought of one that really stood out from when I was a principal here at one of our middle schools here in Columbus, at United Schools Network. We, we had this quota of sorts for homework. So in the middle school where I was, teachers had to assign homework nightly in their classes to students. And they had to grade two to three of those assignments a week and then return the graded assignments to students within 24 hours. And as I stopped and read this particular principle, and I thought about how it applied to my time as a principal, I really learned that that was the wrong approach. And as you start to think about that and reflect on it, you start to think about why Deming said quotas are a fortress against improvement. And there's this... 0:03:31.5 AS: And before you go... Before you go on, I just wanna highlight how normal that sounds. 0:03:38.4 JD: Very normal. Yeah. Very normal. 0:03:39.8 AS: And anybody here, like the first thing I'm gonna do or the first thing I do when I take over as principal is I'm gonna require that there's a minimum amount of this, and it has to be da, da, da, da, da. And it just seems like it is the responsible thing to do as a manager. 0:03:56.4 JD: Yeah. And there was a noble premise behind the quota, and that was that students needed frequent feedback on their work in order to learn. That was the premise, right? So it was this work standard, it was well-intentioned, but like a lot of these things that Deming talks about and quotas are no different, is the actual effect was that teachers spent less time giving feedback and more time grading this high volume of work. So this is what happens when you have a quota, is the focus became meeting the quota, grading the two to three assignments per week, rather than giving that quality feedback to students. So in this case, this sort of numerical target for graded assignments, then superseded the quality of the feedback. And this is, this is what happens, I think, generally speaking, with quotas and practice. 0:04:56.3 JD: And so when you step back and you think about that particular quota, you say, well, what was the teacher's job? Was it grading two to three homework assignments per week or was it giving students qualit

Should we strive to better understand what happens "downstream" to our defect-free work? No matter the setting, if our work meets requirements and we pass it on, are we responsible for how well it integrates into a bigger system? In this episode, Bill Bellows and Andrew Stotz expand on the interaction between variation and systems and why Dr. Deming regarded Genichi Taguchi's Quality Loss Function as "a better description of the world." TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.8 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today I am continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. The topic for today is, in episode 13, Integration Excellence, part two. Bill, take it away. 0:00:31.4 Bill Bellows: Thank you, Andrew. Always a pleasure to connect with you. Alright. 0:00:40.1 AS: Mine too. 0:00:40.1 BB: [laughter] In episode 12, I thought it was great. We shared perspectives on the human side of integration, what it means to be connected, to be synchronous, to feel included, to feel connected, to feel included or connected when something good happens where you're like, well, I was part of that, or to feel separated is when something bad happens. And, we somehow have the ability to not feel associated with that. I pass the puck to you and you hit the slapshot, it goes into the stands, off the goalkeeper. Y'know, girl gets hit in the head and you feel bad, but I go home and I can sleep. And so why is that? And so anyway, but I thought, and listening to it, and I thought it was a lot of fun to look at the human side of feeling connected or feeling separated. And what I wanted to get into tonight, and perhaps in another episode as well, is the physical side of connections. 0:01:46.5 BB: One thing I wanted, and I got a couple anecdotes. I had a woman in class at Rocketdyne years ago, and she said, "Bill, in our organization, we have compassion for one another." And I said, "Compassion is not enough." And, and so you, Andrew, could be in final assembly at this Ford plant, where you're banging things together with a rubber mallet 'cause they're not quite snap fit, and you're banging them together. I mean they all meet print perhaps, but where they are within the requirements is all over the place, and you're having to bring them together. That's called integration. And so when this woman said, in our organization we have compassion for one another, I said, well, that's like me saying, "Andrew, I feel really bad that you're, I can't believe, Andrew go home. You can bang that together tomorrow. You've been banging it together all day." And what I said to her is that "compassion is not enough." 0:02:54.7 BB: When I feel connected to what you're doing, when I begin to understand that the parts you're banging together meet requirements, but how they meet requirements is causing you the issue. Now, the compassion plus my sense of connection, now we're talking. But short of that, what I think is we have organizations where as she would say, we might feel bad for others. And it means I hear about your injuries and your ergonomic training because of all this, but I don't, until I feel associated with that, I just feel bad. But feeling bad is not enough. But I like that, that sentiment. But what I wanna look at tonight is a greater sense of Dr. Taguchi's so called Loss Function and look at more why we should feel more connected to what's happening downstream. So I wanted to throw that out. [chuckle] On the topic of variation, I just started a new cohort with Cal State Northridge University. And this is my, fifth year in the program doing an eight week class in, seminar in quality management. And the cohort model is, anywhere between two dozen and 30 some students that start, the ones I'm getting started a year ago. 0:04:23.5 BB: And they have class after class after class after class. Then a year into the program they get to meet for eight weeks so then onto other professors in the program. So I was showing them, first quarter, second quarter data points from an incident that happened at Rocketdyne years ago. And I was in a staff meeting and the vertical axis is number of accidents per employee. And the horizontal axis is quarter one, quarter two. So the quarter one data point is there, and I don't have the original data, the original data doesn't matter. But what I say to the students is, imagine we've got the first quarter data, what would you expect for the second quarter data? And what's funny is a number of them said, it should be lower. And I said, "Well, based on what?" And it's like, said "Well, we're gonna go off and study what went wrong and we're gonna improve the process." 0:05:20.6 BB: And I said, "Okay, that's all right." So then, I said, "I'll accept that, that's a possibility." Well, then I showed th

Slogans and exhortations don't work to motivate people. Targets usually encourage manipulation or cheating. John Dues and Andrew Stotz discuss how these three strategies can hinder improvement, frustrate teachers and students, and even cause nationwide scandals. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz. I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. This is episode 16, and we're continuing our discussion about the shift from management myths to principles for the transformation of school systems. And today we're gonna be talking about principle 10 "eliminates slogans, exhortations, and targets." John, take it away. 0:00:37.1 John Dues: Good to be back, Andrew. Yeah, we've been talking about these 14 principles for educational systems transformation for a number of episodes now. I think one, one important thing to point out, and I think we've mentioned this multiple times now, but really the aim in terms of what we're hoping the listeners get out of hearing about all these principles is really about how they all work together, as a system themselves. So, we started with create constancy of purpose. We've talked about a number of other things, like work continually on the system, adopt and institute leadership, drive out fear. Last time we talked about break down barriers. We're gonna talk about eliminating slogans and targets this time, which is principle 10. But really, as you start to listen to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and now 10, what should start to become clear is how all of these things work together. 0:01:34.5 JD: If you are operating as a leader, for example, within sort of the Deming philosophy, one of the things you are gonna do is eliminate these slogans. So all these principles shouldn't be studied in isolation. We study them together, see how they all work together. But let me just start by just reading principle 10 so you have the full picture. So principle 10 is "eliminate slogans, exhortations and targets for educators and students that ask for perfect performance and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system, and thus lie beyond the power of teachers and students." So really what we're talking about is, what's wrong with slogans, exhortations and targets for educators and students, because these things are, pervasive, I think. 0:02:29.5 JD: We've seen them, we've seen the posters on the walls with the various slogans. And, of course targets are everywhere in our educational systems. In my mind the main problem is that they're directed at the wrong people. The basic premise is that teachers and students could sort of simply put in more effort, and in doing so, they could improve quality productivity, anything else that's desirable in our education systems. But the main thing is that, that doesn't take into account that most of the trouble we see within our schools are actually coming from the system. And I think we've talked about this quote is probably one of Deming's most well-known quotes, but he said, "Most troubles and most possibilities for improvement add up to proportion, something like this, 94% belong to the system, which is the responsibility of management, 6% is special." And that's more like, can be sort of tagged or pinned to individual students or individual educators working within the system. So I think that's a really important thing to revisit 'cause it sort of is at the heart of all of these, all of these principles. 0:03:47.7 AS: It's interesting, like, maybe you could give some examples of what type of, slogans or targets or exhortations that you've seen, in your career and what's going on in education these days. 0:04:06.5 JD: Yeah, I mean, I'm gonna give an example here, kind of walk through an example in a second. But there, they're really everywhere, I mean, to varying degrees probably in different places. But, one, that one that sticks out in terms of, a target is when I first started my career in 2001, I was a teacher in Atlanta Public Schools. And No Child Left Behind had just come out. And, basically as they, as the leadership at the school sort of presented what was in this legislation, you know, they would always put up a just chart that basically said, a certain percentage of students are expected to be proficient across the country on state tests. And that, that percentage would increase over time starting in 2001 when the legislation was rolled out. And by the 2013, '14 school year, the way the tables were laid out is that 100% of students would be proficient in reading and math across the country in third through eighth grade. And of course, that didn't come to fruition. There's no chance that that ev

What does it mean that people feel connected and included when something good happens yet dissociate when something bad happens? In this episode, Bill Bellows and Andrew Stotz discuss the human side of integration. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.9 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. The topic for today, in today's episode, number 12, is Integration Excellence. Bill, take it away. 0:00:32.2 Bill Bellows: Thank you, Andrew. So before we talk about integration excellence, I wanted to throw out a couple thoughts. And listening to the podcast, I was reminded that when I share examples, there are times when I mention companies by name, and there's times I don't. And my hope is that people in those organizations don't feel offended. So what I found with students is, if I use the name, there's the risk of someone in the class having worked for that company who feels offended. If I don't use the name, then there's a sense that I'm making the stories up. [chuckle] So I just want to say I um... But there are... What I find is that most organizations are run with what Dr. Deming would refer to as a prevailing style of management, in which case examples such as replacing the cardstock paper with regular paper, and all organizations have those types of stuff. So I just want anyone to feel offended by that. 0:01:40.1 AS: Well, we can make an announcement. 0:01:43.3 BB: Go ahead. 0:01:45.3 AS: Remember those shows that we used to watch that says the names have been changed to protect... but here we're going to say the names have been changed to protect the guilty, [chuckle] not the innocent. 0:01:57.3 BB: Well, there are some stories, I can't share the names for a number of reasons, but they're all the same. Anyway, next thing I wanted to share is, again, on a recurring theme, we talked in the past about red pen companies and blue pen companies, or me and we, or last straw and all straw. And I was recently in... I was in the Netherlands last week doing a class live session for a group that I'm just starting to work with, and we did a physical simulation, a live experiential thing that built upon all the ideas we're talking about here. And I had the group do the trip report, looking at blue pen companies and red pen companies, or however you want to look at the contrast. 0:03:00.1 BB: And we talked about what are the hallway conversations in both organizations? And another was, what are the survival skills in both organizations? And the fairly straightforward survival skills in a last straw organizations are, be really good at shifting blame, be really good at hiding errors, hoarding information is power. And I look at, what are survival skills in a blue pen company or an all straw organization? That's sharing knowledge as power as opposed to hoarding it, it's sharing it. And so we got into those, all those, the usuals. And then I said to them, "Okay, so imagine we are, here we are in a last straw organization, I'm the president of the company and we're in a Friday afternoon staff meeting. 0:03:56.7 BB: And because it's a last straw organization, that means you work for me." I said, "If it was an all straw organization, you would work, and people always say with,": I said, exactly, it's with versus for, but it's a last straw organization. So you work for me. I walk in to the end of the week staff meeting. I apologize for running late. And then I turned to you and say, "I just got off the phone with a customer. I need to know who's responsible for last week's shipment." And then I turned to you, Andrew, and I say, "Andrew, was it you?" And you say, "No, it was Joe." [chuckle] And then I go to Joe and I say, "Joe, according to Andrew, it was you. And he says, "No, no, no, it was Sally." 0:04:44.6 BB: And then I'll go to Sally and actually I won't go to Sally. I'll then go to somebody next to Sally and I say, "It sounds like Sally was involved in this. Can anyone corroborate that?" Then someone else raised their hand and said, "Okay." 'Cause in the olden days, we went by one witness, but nowadays we need two witnesses. Okay, so we've got two witnesses. So, okay, Sally. So then I turned to Sally and I say, "I need you in the front of the room right now." And they're like, "Right now you want me to come?" "Yeah, I want you to come to the front of the room in front of the entire class." 0:05:18.0 BB: And I've had times people get really anxious. I've had times when people walk up on stage and they're like, "You want me to... " "Yeah, I want you up here right now." And they stand alongside me and I say, "So Sally, I understand you're responsible for last week's shipment." And she's like, "Uhhh, yes." And I say, "I just want to thank you. Th

Listening to understand and learn is often harder than not-really-listening because you're thinking about what to say. Dr. Deming emphasized learning and was excited about ideas he heard from others every day. In this episode, David Langford and Andrew Stotz talk about why and how managers, including teachers, should listen to staff or students. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:03.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today, we continue going through Dr. Deming's 14 items that he discuss in New Economics about the role of a manager of people after transformation. In the third edition, that's page 86. In the second edition, that's page 125. And we're talking about point number 12 and that is "he listens and learns without passing judgment on him that he listens to." And we decided to title this one, Do You Listen to Speak or Listen to Learn? David, take it away. 0:00:56.8 David P. Langford: Yeah. Well, thanks. It's good to be back, Andrew. Yeah, I was just, I was just thinking that when I was at Deming's conferences and a couple of times sat with him either after the end of the day or even at lunchtime, etc. Or just watching him interact with other people, it was often pretty amazing that he'd be chatting with somebody and then he'd pull out these little notebooks and he's all of a sudden just writing down something that somebody told him or that somebody said or... And later in the day, a lot of times he'd pull out the notebook and say to somebody, "Look what I learned today." And I was always just so impressed with that. And I don't know how many four-day conferences I was at with him, at least half a dozen, and always the same, always swan with that little notebook, always writing stuff down. 0:02:02.9 DL: And so this point comes to mind about how special that made you feel that here you have the master of the third industrial revolution, writing down what, what you say, people that he doesn't really know that well or something, but just a point that somebody made and how important that was to him and to keep track of that. And a lot of times I think we've lost that skill. And I like the title of this session because a lot of times when people are having even casual conversations, they're not really listening to what the person is saying. They're thinking about what they're going to say next or how they're going to respond to a point that was made. And when I really started taking these points to heart and thinking about it, even as a classroom teacher, I began to realize that I really wasn't listening to my students. I was preparing to talk at them. [laughter] I remember... 0:03:16.0 AS: And they were preparing to be talked at. 0:03:18.6 DL: Yeah. They're ready to take notes, and you know, but they weren't ready to think and offer opinions and to go through that whole process of working through it. I'll never forget my friend Dr. Myron Tribus, he was a professor at Dartmouth, I think in the engineering school. And for some reason, his whole lecture that he was going to do one day was just either lost or something just before he was ready to walk out in his classroom of 200 kids, students that he was working with and everything. And he thought, "Oh my God, what am I going to do? I don't have my notes. I don't have all this stuff and everything else." Anyway, he just started asking them questions and put them into groups and had the groups discuss things and then come back and pose questions and debate each other and talk and work through. And he told me he'd never had so many students on the way out of classes. "Wow, that was the best class we've ever had." [laughter] 0:04:21.7 AS: Such a great, a great opportunity when you come unprepared, but you've got a group of people in front of you with all kinds of opportunities to pull out discussions. 0:04:37.3 DL: It's sort of like, are you prepared to be unprepared? [laughter] So there's a difference, there's incompetence where you just come in and you don't know what you're doing and, you know, you're lost, or you're prepared, this is a plan that you're going to come in and actually listen to people and present and go through things. I remember even in a high school class that I had, one of the most successful things we did is, I may have told you this story before, but anyway, the library would get all the newspapers and then after a day they're no good. And so coming into class, I would just get all the newspapers from the previous day. And the challenge for the students was to go quickly through the newspapers and pick out relevant events happening around the world and be prepared to discuss that in small groups and stuff. At first, I just thought of it as an activity. And it turned into be

Most people agree: teamwork and collaboration generate greater results than isolation and silos. So why do we let barriers get in the way? In this episode, John Dues and host Andrew Stotz talk about barriers to collaboration and how to break them down. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.7 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. This is episode 15, and we are continuing our discussion about the shift from management myths to principles for the transformation of school systems. John, take it away. 0:00:34.9 John Dues: Good to be back, Andrew. So we're talking about these 14 Principles for educational system transformation, like you said, I think last episode we talked about Drive Out Fear, so this episode I thought we'd focus on that next Principle, which is Break Down Barriers. So Principle nine, break down barriers. The way I have this framed is "to break down barriers between departments and grade levels and develop strategies for increasing cooperation among groups and individuals, everyone must work as a team to foresee problems in the production and use of high quality learning experiences" in the case of schools. I was looking back through some notes, and I just happened to come across a quote from Out of the Crisis that I thought was a good quote to sort of start off with, in that book, Deming said "Teamwork is risky business. He that works to help other people may not have as much production to show for the annual rating as he would if he worked alone." And I think what this does for me is really illustrate how big a job breaking down barriers is, because everybody's gonna say, yes, I'm for working as a team. Everybody's gonna say I'm for cooperation. 0:01:58.9 JD: But when the rubber meets the road, you know what actually happens? And I think that quote is a good one, too, because it very clearly connects back to Drive Out Fear. Right. 'Cause what are you going to do once you break down the barriers? What's the behavior that you hope to see? And, you know, the behavior that you hope to see is only possible if you also drive out fear, which I think is, you know, showing that there's this connection between all of these Principles, there are these mutually supporting guiding principles. 0:02:36.3 AS: One thing that's just popping in my head is if you didn't incentivize people, let's think of young people, maybe. Would people naturally be, you know, helpful and doing teamwork? We know that, you know, the annual ratings and those types of things can incentivize being, you know, selfish and not, not working across the organization. But I'm just curious, what are your thoughts on that? 0:03:06.8 JD: Yeah, I think... If, if, are you using incentives as a pejorative in this context? 0:03:13.9 AS: Yes. 0:03:16.6 JD: Yeah, I think you have to look at the system that you've set up and the behaviors that result, and then sort of step back and see that whole picture, what is it that... What's the behavior that you're causing by the system you've set up? So I think... That's the major point I think. 0:03:34.0 AS: I'm just thinking about like when someone's young and, you know, they're just living a normal life, they're out with their friends, they're playing in the woods, when I was young, you know, those types of things. Are they naturally helping each other and, you know, naturally want to help or are they naturally selfish? 0:03:53.0 JD: Well, yeah, I think that's a good question. I think that would probably depend a lot on the context. I think, you know, if you're generally talking about young kids, there's probably a sort of a natural inclination to cooperation that's sort of, I think maybe stomped out, extinguished, as you encounter the various systems that are in place in schools, in work settings, those types of things. So, I think, yeah, I mean, I think I would probably lean that way, that there's a natural inclination to cooperation that sort of, is depressed, you know, through the various work and school systems that we've set up. You know, that's a generalization, obviously, but I would probably concur with that. Yeah. 0:04:39.8 AS: You talked about departments and grade levels, and when I think about breaking down barriers, I always think about departments. But maybe you could explain breaking down barriers between grade levels too. 0:04:54.3 JD: Yeah. I mean, I think a grade level team in a school system can be very similar to a department in a business. I mean, obviously I'm working in a school system. And so, there are departments, there's, you know, operations folks, there's HR folks, there are the academic folks and so forth and so on. But there's also these grade level teams where, you know, oftentimes in a school, teachers work most closely wit

What's the difference between Compliance Excellence and Contextual Excellence? Is one better than the other? Which one does a Deming organization pursue? In this episode, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz talk about the variety of types of excellence, and why they matter. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.7 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. The topic for today is episode 11: In Search of Excellence. Bill, go ahead, take it away. 0:00:28.9 Bill Bellows: All right. So, as I've been doing for the last few episodes, I like to go back to the prior episode. Because I listen to these again and again and again. Oh, there's other things I wanna say. [laughter] Remember the title of the last session, Andrew? 0:00:46.1 AS: Well, that depends. [laughter] The title was, It Depends. 0:00:50.7 BB: Alright. Alright. So you know I'm fond of that phrase. So I wanna... I thought of after, you know, in the last couple weeks is, I took a class in program management at a big university in Greater Los Angeles. I mean, it could have been anywhere, but it was in Los Angeles, and there were 25, 30 people in the room, maybe more, from around the world coming into this university. It was a three day program, you know, like, $1,800. $1800. I had just joined a department called The Program Management Office, and I thought, I should go find out what program management is it all about? I had some ideas, but I thought, "I want to go take a real class on this." The class was presented by an aerospace veteran in project management. He had been involved in major programs with Hughes, installing, you know, working on airports around the world and other DOD stuff. 0:01:48.6 BB: And I mean, he was, he was a very interesting guy. I got there early every day looking, I was hoping there'd be an opportunity I could start a conversation with him, have lunch with him, that never happened. But three days long. And so, on the second day, he threw out a question to the audience, and people are sitting in a... It's kind of an amphitheater, with the rows were kind of curved. So he throws out a question to the audience and the guy in the front row answers, "it depends." [laughter] And the instructor very deliberately walked from the front of the room, a good 15 feet without saying anything, just walked right at that person in the front row, you know, all at the same level, gets right in his face and says the following, Andrew, are you ready? 0:02:47.6 AS: I'm ready. 0:02:48.6 BB: He says, "Are you an attorney?" [laughter] And I thought to myself, "All of that for the answer, "it depends," really?" And so, [laughter] later that afternoon, somebody asked the instructor a question, "Hey, what if you're in a situation where you gotta deal with blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, this, this, this, this, this, how would you handle that?" 0:03:17.3 AS: And for the listeners out there, you know the punchline here, come on, give it to me. What did he say? 0:03:23.5 BB: No, here's what he said. He said, "Well, if it involves this, I would do this. If it involves that, I would do that." And so, what did I say, Andrew? 0:03:42.6 AS: What did you say? What do you mean? 0:03:44.7 BB: I bit my tongue. 0:03:45.9 AS: Oh, you didn't say anything when he said that? 0:03:48.6 BB: Because what he just said was, "it depends." 0:03:50.4 AS: "It depends" in another way. 0:03:52.8 BB: Yeah. He found another way to say "it depends." So it was also... 0:03:56.0 AS: He sounded kind of smart, you know, well, let's just narrow it down to two potential options. 0:04:00.8 BB: "Are you an attorney?" Yeah. But he still... What he was still saying was, it depends on the situation. 0:04:09.3 AS: Yep. 0:04:09.8 BB: And I just thought... I mean... And not that I didn't mind that answer, but I was just dumbstruck as to why he was so emphatic in challenging this answer, "it depends"? And I just thought, again, I never went up and asked, but I just thought, I wasn't sure it was gonna go anywhere. So anyway, so I wanted to throw that out. Going back a couple episodes, I wanna talk about metrics and KPIs and point out that there's nothing wrong, I mean, we're not saying KPIs are bad. What we're talking about is, when KPIs are used as goals and in a way that unnecessarily drives the organization in different directions, but if a KPI is just a metric of how we're doing in sales, that's one thing. 0:05:03.7 BB: But if the metric is, I want sales to be this number, and I go to people in procurement and say, "I want you to cut back on procurement," you know, we can end up with a conflict. You know, I had a woman in class once who worked for a gym, health club. And her job was to sell memberships and get on the phone ever

What causes fear in an organization? How is fear hurting employee morale, productivity, and overall performance? What great things can happen when you remove fear? In this episode, John Dues and host Andrew Stotz talk about fear, and how managers can get rid of it. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.6 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. This is Episode 14, and we are continuing our discussion about the shift from management myths to principles for the transformation of school systems. John, take it away. 0:00:32.9 John Dues: Andrew, it's good to be back. Yeah, we've been talking about these principles. We've sort of shifted from the myths to the principles that, you know, especially education systems leaders can use to guide their transformation work. I think we're up to Principle 8 today, and most recently I think last time we did, "institute training on the job" and "adopt and institute leadership." So we'll move on to Principle 8, which is "Drive Out Fear." So I'll start with just reading the principle verbatim from the book. So Principle 8: "Drive out fear so that everyone may work effectively for the school system. No one can perform their best unless they feel secure to express ideas, ask questions, and make mistakes." So I think maybe for me, when you look at the 14 principles, I haven't done this analysis, but I would venture a wager that Dr. Deming spent more time on this particular principle and related topics than any of the other ones. 0:01:44.6 JD: He discussed it numerous times in Out of the Crisis, numerous times in The New Economics. And one of the quotes that really stands out for me on this topic was in Out of the Crisis where Deming said, "Where there is fear, there will be wrong figures." And I don't think that... I don't think people sort of fully appreciate just how much sort of... "Writing fiction" is sort of how I've framed this in the past in one of our earlier episodes, but just sort of how much made-up data there is in every organization. And that can be wrong figures in the form of qualitative descriptions of important work, it can be quantitative data. But in either case, it makes it nearly impossible to improve our organizations. Because how would you even know where to start improvement if the figures and the descriptions of the work are inaccurate? So that'd be a good topic for today. 0:02:53.3 AS: Sometimes this one about fear is, sometimes it's easy for people to understand and sometimes it's hard. You know, like, when you think about fear, you can think about physical fear like, "Well, okay, am I in physical danger here?" Like, what are we talking about? Or, "Am I in fear that I'm gonna lose my job?" And some people may think that that's a good thing. And one of the first things I want to just think about is, what are the specific things in a school or in a school environment that causes people to be fearful? Maybe we could identify what you see, because you've talked about the outcome of fear is made-up data, wrong figures. It's all kinds of outcomes from fear, but what are the sources of fear? 0:03:47.2 JD: Yeah. Well, one thing I think of is you certainly can have sort of a tyrannical boss or manager. That certainly exists where there's actual fear, they yell, they threaten, passive-aggressive, those types of things. So that certainly can exist. 0:04:05.4 AS: Yep. 0:04:05.9 JD: I've definitely witnessed that in my almost 25 years in terms of career, you're gonna witness things like that. But I think more often what I'm talking about is sort of more subtle versions of fear that permeate throughout organizations. So sources, there can be different sources. I think they can come internally from some of the systems and processes you've set up in your own school or school system. Some of them are external, so, I mean, a go-to source of fear for a lot of people is, "How do my kids that I'm teaching perform on the state test?" That can be a source of fear, for sure. There is sort of internal to your system. I think the fear... I think a lot of people have sort of apprehension when the principal comes to your classroom to observe your class, and then there's sort of the ratings and rankings that go with a typical performance evaluation. So I think that can be another source of fear in a school system. And there's probably many other sort of versions of that. But I was thinking of... 0:05:25.4 JD: A lot of times when you hear people talk about driving out fear, you sort of get the negative stories. I think, not related to schools, but I think of a classic example of fear in the form of an unwillingness to speak up and say something is the Challenger space shuttle explosion. I think that's a classic sort of example of where peo

Perfection may be your goal, but unless you create an artificial environment, you're not going to get it. David Langford and host Andrew Stotz discuss how good managers/teachers let go of perfection and, instead, understand variation, then work on the system to produce better and better outcomes for everyone. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.6 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. The topic for today is a discussion and a continuation of our discussion of Dr. Deming's 14 items that he discusses in The New Economics about the role of a manager of people after transformation. Today we're talking about point number 11. And that is, "he does not expect perfection." So we titled this one, "Are You Expecting Perfection?" David, take it Away. 0:00:51.8 David Langford: Great. Good to be back again, Andrew. Thank you. 0:00:53.7 AS: Indeed. 0:00:54.9 DL: So, yeah. Five simple words for a whole podcast. So what, what is Deming talking about here? Well, I think underneath these five simple words about expecting perfection is the whole concept of understanding variation and understanding systems, and understanding psychology and understanding how do you implement new theories and come up with new ideas and innovation. And that's Deming's concept of Profound Knowledge. And if you don't have some Profound Knowledge and understand basic statistical variation, then you do go about thinking, "Well, I can just, I can just expect perfection." I remember Deming talking about this point and saying, "I don't... " And I don't know if I have this exactly right. But he said, "I don't demand perfection, but I'm happy when I get it" or something to that effect. 0:02:04.0 DL: Meaning that when something just turns out perfect, you know, that's fantastic, but that doesn't take into account the variation in people and systems and process and everything that goes into a system. So basically in a school, in a classroom, I mean, one of the ways you can, you can get perfection, have everybody score 100% on a test or something like that, is to have students cheat. [chuckle] Because then everybody can get the same answers and do the exact same thing and there's no variation and there's no reason to have any discussion or anything like that. And actually, that actually happens in classrooms. 0:02:55.4 DL: If you make the expectation so high and then you create an artificial scarcity of top marks by grading on a curve or, or there's only one, one winner of a system, then the only way some people can get there is to cheat, is to do something. I remember a friend of mine got his MBA, Master's in Business Administration, and the environment was so competitive that when the teacher would give an assignment, the students would immediately run over to the library and check out all the books that had to do with that assignment, so other people wouldn't be able to learn. [chuckle] And because you know they're expecting perfection, expecting you to master this to get this. And it's really interesting because when people do things like that in systems, we often wanna blame the people without first blaming the system and basically, you as the manager of that system. So a teacher in a classroom, if you're not getting the perfection that you wanna have, you want to think about you know, "What am I doing? What can I be doing differently that might get us closer and closer to more and more people getting those top marks?" 0:04:31.5 DL: So when I first started learning about this, and this point actually really goes to Deming's work in education about grading, grading systems, and him talking about eliminating grades and so on and so forth. I went through the same process, because I couldn't stop giving grades, or I wouldn't have a job any longer. So I had to think about, "Well, I could stop...I could create processes whereby more and more people could get that A or could get that perfection or could get that top mark." So I actually went to my principal and asked him, I said, "Is there any state law or school rule or anything else that prevents all students from getting an A in my class?" And he laughed at me [laughter] and said, "Oh, no, it's not possible, but we'd love to have all the kids getting A's." Well, at the end of that year, I think out of the 134 students, I saw that I had I think about 132 A's. And as soon as I pushed that button and turned in my grades, the principal was in my room in about 10 minutes. 0:05:41.7 AS: Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. 0:05:42.8 DL: "What are you doing?" [chuckle] "What are you doing?" And the academic counselor was right with him, and he said, "You're destroying the whole grading system." I said, "Well, thank you very much. That was my aim." But yet yo

When we answer a question with "it depends" we are asking for more information about the possible variables that will inform the answer. In this episode, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz discuss how, in the Deming world, "it depends" can trigger improvements in processes or products and services. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.6 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. The topic for today is, in this episode 10, It Depends, Rethinking Improvements. Bill, take it away. 0:00:34.6 Bill Bellows: Rethinking improvement, yes. 0:00:38.3 AS: You're always teasing us with your titles, Bill. 0:00:43.2 BB: I hate when that happens, I hate when that happens. No, I uh, what I would tell managers when I was doing these one-day seminars all over Boeing for year after year after year after year, and the managers would wanna know, so what should I expect from the people afterwards? And I said, or I would warn them, I said, here's what's gonna happen, just so you're ready. I'd say, you're gonna hear a lot more of people saying, "It depends." 'Cause to me, Andrew, "it depends" is the beginning of an appreciation of a system. So Andrew, you and I are going out to dinner and then you say, would you like to have some wine? And I say, sure. Then you say, red or white? And I say well, it depends Andrew, what are you having? Right, I mean, so to me, it depends is an understanding of what Ackoff would call interactions, that I cannot order the wine without knowing the meal. Planning a wedding, we can't order the food without knowing the guest list, can't order the music without going to the guest list. The colors of the flowers depend upon, the color of the tuxes depend upon it. And what is that? It is looking at things, not in isolation, but as a system. So when I tell my students, graduate and undergraduate is, you already manage systems, you already manage interactions. 0:02:09.0 BB: You don't use that word, but you couldn't plan a vacation without looking at things in context. You couldn't run errands on Saturday morning without knowing what time the store is open, what time... So, so I think we have a natural proclivity of looking at things as a system, quite often, quite often. It could be better. But I... So I just throw out, I just, I mean, if somebody asked me a question on a topic I've never heard about before, what I find is, one is I think, well, how would a red pen company, a me organization, a last straw organization look at that? And they'd look at things in isolation. Which reminds me of an Ackoff quote. He says, "getting less of what you don't want doesn't get you what you want." So we're gonna drive variation to zero, and when I was listening to the last podcast, it was talking about this driving variation to zero. You can't go to zero, 'cause Andrew, cloning does not produce identical, twins are not identical. So for those who think you could drive variation to zero, you can't. Get under a microscope and you're gonna see differences in snowflakes. The question behind reducing variation is, is it a worthwhile investment, which gets us into this continual improvement thing. 0:03:32.6 BB: But, so whether we're reducing variation to zero, reduce... Eliminating waste, eliminating non value-added efforts, what Ackoff asking is, he is challenging us saying, getting rid of what you don't want, what is it that we want? And here I had a great quote from a good friend, Dr. Deming, he says, "it would be better if everyone worked together as a system with the aim for everybody to win." 0:04:00.2 AS: He was saying, win-win before everybody was saying it. 0:04:06.3 BB: Well, what I like about that quote is, did the word quality appear in that quote? Did you hear the word quality anywhere in there, Andrew? 0:04:14.8 AS: No, I didn't hear it. 0:04:17.1 BB: Huh. And Dr. Deming was that quality guy, right? 0:04:20.9 AS: Mm. 0:04:22.4 BB: So he's got quotes that don't have to do with quality? [laughter] 0:04:25.0 AS: Yeah, and so that's one of the things that I think people come, when they first come to Deming, they're looking at, they're thinking of quality in terms of tools, you know... 0:04:35.6 BB: Tools, techniques, yeah... 0:04:36.8 AS: And then they find... 0:04:37.1 BB: And so part of the reason that I wanted to throw that quote out is, to reinforce my point, that I look at what Dr. Deming is doing, is providing guidance for how to manage resources, time, energy, money, space, equipment, tools and techniques, ideas, as a system. And the ideas as a system, is the idea that things are interdependent; I depend on you, you depend on me. And I think the better we understand that, you realize is that improved quality, what he would call quality,

"Trust me!' We've all heard it, and probably said it. But how do you build a culture of trust at work, or in a classroom? David Langford and host Andrew Stotz talk about how inclusive decision-making inspires trust, and leads to better outcomes. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.5 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today we continue our discussion of Dr. Deming's, 14 items that he discusses in New Economics about the role of a manager of people after that manager has been through the transformation. This is on the third edition of The New Economics on page 86, and in the second edition on page 125. Now, today we're talking about point 10, which is a simple and short point, and it reads as follows, "He creates trust, he creates an environment that encourages freedom and innovation." So we decided to title, this one, "Trust Me." David, take it away. [laughter] 0:01:02.3 David Langford: Thanks, Andrew. Good to be back again. So, yeah, this point it seems simple when you just read through it, and it seems logical like all managers of people would want to create trust with their people, but it's not like it happens automatically, [chuckle], and I think a lot of managers of people do things inadvertently, hopefully they're inadvertently, where they create distrust and stress, etcetera. One of those most obvious things is performance evaluations, "Trust me, and then I'm going to rank you amongst people in the department, and then we're going to have a prize for the top person and/or a bonus or something else within that." 0:02:03.6 DL: And people learn that you're not really interested in improving the product, the service, the classroom, the function of what's going on, you're really interested in who's pleasing you. [chuckle] And that's how you get a promotion, and that's how you move up is like, they'll... The old saying, "It's not what you know, it's who you know." And, I think that's really the heart of what Deming's getting at here, that you're supposed to create an environment of trust. And it doesn't just... It's not a pill you take and where you just all of a sudden you can say to people all you want to "trust me," [laughter] but it's over time, when you find out, "Are you trustworthy?" And if you prove not to be trustworthy, either you can't keep things confidential or you talk behind people's backs, or you, you know, any of those kinds of things, over time people start to realize you're not somebody to be trusted. 0:03:16.3 DL: I often heard Deming say things like, "If you create an environment where people can't trust you, pretty soon you're only left with the people who can't get another job." [laughter] "Can't go someplace else, because you're just not trustworthy." Well, the same thing happens in a classroom, a classroom teacher that is not trustworthy and can't build trust among a classroom of students, won't get the very best from those students. Pretty soon they'll only do what the teacher wants to be done, and then that's it. They won't think on their own. They won't... Deming is talking about they won't become innovative in what they're doing, because you're not a trustworthy person managing the class. And so how do you do that? How do you build trust over time? Well, a big part of that to me is involving people in the decision-making process. On the previous points, in this section that we're working through, Deming talked about, the role of a good manager and a leader and etcetera, and those kinds of things. Ultimately, you still have the formal position, right? 0:04:43.2 DL: And it's your job or in some cases, you're next on the line, if you don't make a good decision. But the more you can involve people in that process of making decisions, number one, you're going to come out with a better decision, because you just get more brains looking at a situation in ways that you just never thought about before. And number two, it's sort of a double-edged sword, not only did you get a better decision but whatever decision you do come up with gets implemented to a higher degree. So when I'm teaching teachers to do this with classrooms with students, I always tell them, you know, if you involve students in a decision-making process, and let's say that it doesn't turn out well, it wasn't a good decision. 0:05:42.8 DL: You win both ways, right? Because it wasn't just your decision. And it's the same way with a manager in a company. If it's just your decision and something doesn't work, people will just let it fail, they'll just let it not work because they had no part in it. They don't really care if it works or not. And they'll just let you, gladly let you fail in some cases and not bail you out. But if it's our decision and we all u

In this episode, John Dues and host Andrew Stotz discuss what Dr. Deming meant by "institute training on the job" and "adopt and institute leadership" (principles 6 and 7). How do you follow those principles in the context of education? TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.6 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. This is episode 13, and we're continuing our discussion about the shift from management myths to principles for the transformation of schools systems. John, take it away. 0:00:30.0 John Dues: Good to be back, Andrew. Yeah. We've turned to this set of principles that can be used by systems leaders to guide their transformation work. In the last few episodes, we've discussed the first five principles, the five of the 14. Just to recap real quick, we did constancy of purpose was number one. Principle two is adopt the new philosophy. Then we did principle three, cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Four was maximize high quality learning, and the last time we talked about working continually on the system. And then the plan today is to talk about the sixth principle, which is institute training, and then the seventh principle, which is adopt and institute leadership. So, I figure we just dive in with principle six. So sort of the short version is "institute training on the job." And this really is training for everybody in the system. So in our system that would be students, teachers, staff, management, basically so that everyone can make better contributions to the school system. 0:01:42.7 JD: And just to clarify, when I'm talking about training, I think what it's important to know is that I'm talking about learning how to do a particular job within the system using a particular set of methods and tools. And basically the purpose of training in a system is to allow a worker or a student to know exactly what their job is. Now, we're constantly updating that training because in our world for teachers and principals, you have to constantly develop new skills to keep up with changes in whatever it may be, cognitive science, new curriculum, lesson design, new technology, better teaching techniques. Any number of things that we're training on and improving our training on on an ongoing basis. But a major aim of the training in our system is to reduce variation in methods, basically. I think no matter what type of training you get as a teacher, I think you've experienced variation in methods. 0:02:51.3 JD: And if you go to pretty much any school building in the United States, I think most educators would very quickly tell you, and I think even parents and students, you could sort of go room to room and say, yep, that's the strict teacher. That's the teacher that lets you get away with anything. So this is sort of commonly known when it comes to how teachers run their classrooms, especially on the classroom management level. Everybody knows who has the highly structured classrooms or the disciplined classrooms, but this really does cause problems when you think about it, 'cause there's this mixed message about what a classroom is supposed to look like. And I think on the flip side of classroom management is instruction. And I think there's a lot of variation there. And that's more hidden, I think, but probably possibly more important to sort of consider. And so when you have a typical, let's say an elementary school, an elementary school has three third grade classrooms, and each of those three teachers in most schools in the US, they operate pretty independently of each other. 0:04:05.6 JD: And a lot of schools, each of those teachers would have their own sort of preferred methods. And even sequencing for how that, let's say, a math class is taught. But then the problem is that some combination of students from each one of those classes in third grade that following year are gonna end up in a fourth grade classroom. And now this fourth grade teacher has to deal with this. And really the fourth grade teacher is this customer of the third grade teachers. But if each of the third grade teachers are sort of doing their own thing, then they've sort of optimized each of their own classrooms at the expense of the system. So that's what I'm talking about when I'm talking about sort of reducing variation in methods through training. 0:04:58.9 AS: So there's a few things to discuss in this that I think are interesting. The first thing is, let me just repeat what you said. The aim is to reduce variation in methods. I think most people, if they expected you to say something, they would've expected you to say, "The goal is to reduce variation in outcomes." So tell us why... Now, it may be that methods get to reduce variation in outcomes, but you're focusing on

Most of the time, variation between students or workers is the result of common cause situations, but sometimes you find folks who consistently aren't performing at the same level. Does more punishment work? What should you do instead? In the episode, David Langford and host Andrew Stotz discuss how managers (or teachers) should approach these "special cause" situations. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today we continue our discussion of Dr. Deming's 14 items that he discusses in his New Economics book about the role of a manager of people after the transformation. This is on page 86 of the third edition, or page 125 of the second edition. And this is point number nine. Let me read it to you before we get started. So again, for a, the role of a manager of people, this is the new role of a manager of people after transformation. Point number nine, he will try to discover who, if anyone, is outside the system in need of special help. This can be accomplished with simple calculations. If there be individual figures on production or on failures. Special help may be only simple rearrangement of work. It might be more complicated. He in need of special help is not in the bottom 5% of the distribution of others. He is clean outside that distribution. And Dr. Deming presents a normal distribution and some other things, in this chart that he presents in this one. And we're gonna call this episode: Who Needs Special Help? David, take it away. 0:01:40.5 David Langford: Okay. Yeah, this is always a topic of discussion because, there's all kinds of management theories out there, right? About, how we manage, I can't remember who, was a proponent of just getting rid of the bottom 10% of your... 0:01:57.9 AS: Jack Welch. 0:01:58.0 DL: Organization every year. Jack Welch, yeah. Notoriously wrong, with that. And, or well, "if you can't cut it, out you go." And that all sounds good until it becomes so expensive to constantly be hiring new people and replacing people. And the fear level goes up so high that you can't get anything done because nobody wants to take any risks because you really can't take a risk because you might be gone. So Deming is saying a lot really in this point, he talks about the distribution of people. Well, so first thing is you have to figure out what is that distribution, right? So how are you calculating that? Or how are you figuring out what that performance level is? Well, as a teacher in a classroom, obviously, you have tests that you're giving, you have projects that are happening, etcetera. It is actually pretty easy to see that distribution of performance in a classroom. You give a simple test on something and then you look at the test results and you start to see, okay, everybody scored on this test from 70%-100% on this test, right? So you can say, okay, that's an average of about 85 or so for the whole class. 0:03:31.5 DL: When you look at it on a histogram scale like that, what Deming is really talking about, he's not talking about just the people that were scoring at the lower end of that distribution. People that were getting 70, 75, 80, etcetera. They were all at the lower end of the distribution of that system. But what it's showing is that's the capability of the system. You did something, you did a process with people, you tested the process, the process produced that curve, and on average, it gives you an average of 85. Now deciding whether or not that's good, is good, is good good enough, that's a whole different really discussion than what really Deming is talking about here. So he's not talking about people just on the lower end of a distribution of performance. He's really talking about somebody that's completely outside of that distribution. So in a classroom, if I did something like that and we did a project or a test or whatever, and everybody is scoring from 70%-100% except for maybe two people that got 10 or 5, right? 0:04:46.6 DL: Obviously these are two people completely outside of the system. And what he is really talking about is probably no amount of adjusting the system is going to help those two people. They are so far outside of the distribution that they really do need special help. So in a classroom that can mean, this could be children with special needs, they could be hearing defects, they could be the eyesight that, I don't know how many times I thought somebody was an understanding problem. And then we find out, oh, they couldn't see, either they couldn't see to read or they couldn't see the... 0:05:31.8 AS: Something very simple. 0:05:32.3 DL: The whiteboard in front of them. Yeah. And they got tested and got glasses and everything and wow, it just mad

In this episode, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz talk about resource management in a non-traditional sense. Bill explains how managing the variation and integration in your product or service is just as important as increasing consistency and removing waste. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. The topic for today is episode nine, Resource Management. Bill, take it away. 0:00:28.9 Bill Bellows: Thank you, Andrew. And thanks for our audience and thanks for joining in again. So we're picking up following episode nine, which was, I called it the Paradigms of Variation. It was, I think the title on the podcast may be a little bit different, but what we've been building up to from the beginning is, parallel tracks. But one aspect that I've been trying to bring forward is this idea of variation in the white beads. We talked about the white bead experiment and the idea that the red beads are not caused by the workers, they're caused by the system. 0:01:13.5 BB: And then what if we got to the point that there were no more red beads? Yes, we can make the red beads faster, we can make the red beads cheaper, but could we make, I'm sorry, we can make the white beads faster. We can make the white beads cheaper with the elimination of the red beads, but if we're dealing with nothing but white beads that are cheaper and made faster, can we improve the quality of the beads? And what I found is, when I press on people, they'll say, "Yes, everything can be improved. Everything can be improved. When I press, press, press, they'll say faster. They'll say cheaper. I said, "Yeah, we said that." I said, "But can they be better?" 0:01:53.4 BB: Is that what Dr. Deming's trying to say with continuous improvement that we stop it a 100% white beads? Or can we go further? And I find people get stuck. And I think it's very easy to get stuck, because that's the world we live in of good parts and bad parts. We focus on the bad to make them good. And what do they do when they're good? Well, they met requirements. But what's missing is this key word called variation. And yes, there's variation in the red beads and Dr. Deming would plot that on a control chart. But Dr. Deming also discovered in, definitely in 1960, from Dr. Taguchi who he met a few years earlier, this notion of variation in the white beads and that the, so I talked earlier also about question number one and quality management. 0:02:44.0 BB: Does this quality characteristic meet requirements? There's only two answers, remember Andrew, yes or no. But then question number two is how many ways are there to meet requirements? And I'd say there's an infinite number if you take into account, how many decimal places you can go. And that, the idea that you can have anywhere from the absolute minimum to the absolute maximum of the requirements is there's all those places be in between. That's called variation. And does it matter where you are within spec? Within spec? And again, by spec I mean specification. You've met the requirements for the activity. And so what we did in episode nine, I'm sorry, episode eight is look at what I call the Two Distribution exercise. And you may have caught me saying there are four suppliers. 0:03:41.7 BB: And at the end I said, forget about the four. There's actually two. I've done it with four, I've done it with two but the important thing is when I show people a number of distributions within requirements, and one of them will be, we'll go from the minimum to the maximum with near zero and frequency at either end to then high in the middle. And I'll say, "The middle is the ideal value." And then I'll say, let's say you also have a really narrow distribution consuming, and I said, last time, 10% of the variation, what I meant to say, and I said at least once, is 10% of the tolerance that, so you're using a very small portion of the tolerance, but you're far away from the ideal value. 0:04:27.0 BB: You're shifted to the right. And so when I give people the choice of buying from one of those two suppliers under the idealized situation, you may recall, Andrew, of same price, same schedule, everything's guaranteed to meet requirements. We've got histograms, we've got control charts. The processes are in control with all those, what Ackoff would call idealized situations. Make it really, really simple. Do I go with the wide one centered on the ideal value or the narrow one over to the right? And time again, people take the really narrow one, which we said was about, why do you like the really narrow one? Because they're more consistent. Then I explained that that's precision. And that's the most popular answer. And I'm reminded of

In this series, John Dues and host Andrew Stotz discuss principles that educational systems leaders can use to guide their transformation work. This episode covers principles 4 and 5: maximize high-quality learning and work continually on the system. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.5 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. Today is episode 12, and we're continuing our discussion about the shift from management myths to principles for the transformation of schools' systems. John, take it away. 0:00:34.4 John Dues: Andrew, it's good to be back. Yeah, like you said, we've sort of turned to this set of principles that can be used by educational systems leaders to guide their transformation work. Two episodes ago, we sort of kicked off the principles, gave a little bit of an introduction. We talked about principle one, which is create constancy of purpose. And then the last time we talked, we kind of broke down two principles. Principle two was adopt the new philosophy, and principle three was, cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. So in this episode, I was gonna sort of take on the next two, the fourth and fifth principles. So the fourth principle is, maximize high quality learning. And the fifth principle is, work continually on the system. 0:01:28.6 JD: So I thought we'd sort of kick things off with principle four, that idea around maximize high quality learning. And I think sort of... If I was gonna capture that principle in just a couple sentences, I would say, you wanna maximize high quality learning and minimize total cost of education by improving the relationship with educational institutions from which students come and to which they matriculate. So, we're thinking about a single source of students coming into a system, such as an elementary school student moving into a middle school, and seeing that as an opportunity to build a long term relationship of loyalty and trust. So that's sort of the overarching idea. And I think if you sort of look at this principle through the lens of United Schools Network, where I work in Columbus, Ohio, I think that's sort of a helpful lens. And when you think about our origin story, we started as a single middle school serving a few east side neighborhoods, near downtown Columbus. And I was the founding principal, school director of that particular campus. 0:02:55.3 JD: And at the time, we decided we were gonna open a middle school, 'cause this is the point often in a student's educational career where they fall so far behind, they often then drop out of school altogether just a few years later. So we wanted to get them in middle school. So, before we were this sort of network of schools in the school system, we were this one school that grew from serving just sixth grade over the first few years to sixth through eighth grade, right. And when you looked at these east side neighborhoods where we were located, there were 15 or so elementary schools from the city school system that formed this sort of de facto feeder pattern into our middle school. Most of those schools were performing in the bottom 5% of schools in the state. Which means when those students then matriculated to our middle school, they typically did so in... The typical kid was at least two, but more often three and even four grade levels below where they should be when they enrolled with us in 6th grade. 0:04:18.1 JD: And, while I didn't have this Deming lens at the time, I did sort of approach things from a process standpoint, from a system standpoint. But, as the middle school principal, I'm thinking about sort of all that entails to run a school and a new school at that, so we're doing all the things that come with a startup. There was no way for me to run around and form relationships with the 15 principals leading those elementary schools from which our students were primarily coming from. 0:04:54.0 JD: And so when we had this opportunity to grow from one school into a network that's now four schools, we elected to grow down into elementary schools. The point in doing so was to move towards this sort of single supplier relationship, that Dr. Deming outlined in his point four. And so now, we have two middle school principals, two elementary schools in our network, and they can work together on a whole host of sort of quality characteristics, like vertically planning curriculum across that K to eight pipeline. And, we were middle schools first and then elementary schools, so while we're getting some of our students from our own elementary schools we're also still getting students from other non-USN schools, non-USN elementary schools, but we're sort of increasingly moving toward that single supplier model. And I think that coordination i

When things go wrong, who gets blamed? When things go right, who gets the credit? Dr. Deming wrote that good managers don't play the blame/credit game. Instead, they "study results [of feedback] with the aim to improve performance." In this episode, David Langford and host Andrew Stotz discuss getting honest feedback, how to react, and why it's important. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.7 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. The topic for today is improving performance. Who's at fault? David, take it away. 0:00:28.8 David P. Langford: Hello again. So we are at point number eight on Deming's role of a manager of people. And it says he will study results with the aim to improve his performance as a manager of people. So once again, Deming wasn't into all the pronouns that we use now and everything. So when he says he, he means he, she, anybody that's a manager of people. So, our aim is to improve performance and everything that we do. Right. So I think what's going on with this simple point that he's making is to get people to think about when things go right, or things go wrong, who's at fault, or who gets the reward or who gets the blame for that process. 0:01:29.1 DL: And as a manager, if things are going well, of course, everybody wants to take credit for that, whether you're a teacher or superintendent, business owner, or whatever, then it was, the same way in politics, right? Everything's going well. Oh, I did it all. And if things are not going well, then obviously it was somebody else's fault. Right. Or if you're a manager of people, like what Deming is talking about here, we have a tendency to blame the individual without first thinking about ourselves as the manager of that situation. So I was just coaching a group of teachers and talking to them about how difficult it is to really think like that as a teacher. Because you think, "Okay, I worked really hard on this lesson, I got everything prepared, I came in and I did it." 0:02:23.8 DL: And I don't know how many times I've heard teachers say something like, "Well, I taught them, but they didn't get it." [laughter] Well, that's probably the problem, you taught them, but they didn't learn it. [laughter] Well, that's probably the problem, right? You taught them, but they didn't they didn't learn it, which is two different things. It's possible to teach and get learning, but it's better to create actual learning experiences through that process. So you have to think about if I'm not getting good results I don't care what your position is as a manager of people I have to turn the finger of blame back towards me and start to say, "Okay, what am I doing differently?" And that's a hard pill to swallow when you start to think like that and because usually most people are trying to put in their best efforts. And Deming said many times we're being killed by best efforts, [chuckle] which is like a crazy thought to think about, wow, I shouldn't be trying hard. Well, you should be working in the right way. So if you're not getting the results that you want probably the very first thing is to go back to the people that you manage and ask them what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong or what could be improved. And I have seen this with just very little kids, like three, four, five-year-olds, when the teacher says, "We just went through that lesson and it seemed like some of you weren't interested, you know, what was the problem?" 0:04:05.4 DL: And they'll tell you, [laughter], "Oh, you went too fast, or we didn't have time to think about it, or we needed more time." Or they'll tell you exactly what the problem is. And it's usually a better way to go than having your supervisor come in and do an observation, because your supervisor probably isn't there every day watching how you're managing people, how you're communicating, how you're having conversations, et cetera. But the people are there every day. And if we're talking about education and kids in classrooms, they're the ones that are experiencing your management style. [laughter] And I've found out that the more you ask, the better they get at giving you advice, telling you what to do. And when you do it, then you get even better advice. So I remember I think I may have told this story before, but I remember I had a new student that came to class and I was in a project like that and I asked the students, I said just take out some sticky notes or whatever you want to, and write down a few thoughts about how you think this last project went. What could be improved, how we could have changed it what, I might do differently next year, et cetera. 0:05:27.7 DL: Just things like that. Well, this new student, he was just like blowing this o

Dr. Deming was a professor for nearly 5 decades, and while most of his examples and writing discussed manufacturing, he applied all the same ideas to teaching. In this episode, John Dues and host Andrew Stotz discuss points 2 and 3 of Dr. Deming's 14 Points for Management - translated for people in education: adopt the new philosophy and cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. 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 John Dues who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. Today we're continuing our discussion about the shift from management myths to principles for the transformation of school systems. John take it away. 0:00:29.4 John Dues: Andrew. It's good to be back. I thought since we've done a number of episodes now just to do a quick recap of where we're at folks that are following along on the Deming Institute website. We're on episode 11. In episodes seven through nine I outlined those six common management myths and you just talked about the point of those three episodes was to help the education systems leaders see what not to do. We've now turned to a set of principles that can be used by these same leaders to guide their transformation work. And in the last episode, episode 10, I introduced the 14 Principles for educational systems transformation. We talked about Principle 1 which was called Create Constancy of Purpose. In this episode I'll describe the second principle which I call Adopt The New Philosophy and the third principle which I call Cease Dependence on Inspection to Achieve Quality. And I mean I think a really important point to make that I got from Dr. Deming when I think about these 14 principles is a preemptive strike. Over the course of 60 years or so of continual improvement work Dr. Deming worked with Japanese industrial leaders, governments, top companies in the United States. Maybe a little bit lesser known was that he was a professor of statistics at New York University for nearly 50 years. 0:02:06.1 JD: And in his books he not only taught the 14 Points to the leaders with which he worked but they also guided his own teaching practices as a professor. And so there was a, sort of, a short Deming quote that stuck out in regards to the 14 Points and who they apply to. He said the 14 Points apply anywhere to small organizations as to large ones to the service industry as well to manufacturing. So I think it's sort of a preemptive strike of sorts, in case people in schools would think that maybe these 14 principles only apply to industry or only apply to healthcare and other sector but they really do apply to the education sector and in fact that was, sort of, a sector close to Deming's heart since he spent like I said five decades or so in academia. 0:03:00.3 AS: Yeah I mean so it's a good point that I think when you read Deming's material or if you watch his videos there's an overwhelming amount of information about factories and businesses and all that. And there's less about service sector. There is talk in there about service sector. But so I think a lot of people that first stumble upon it start to think, "Oh, this is just for factory quality control", or something like that. And that's been proven wrong particularly the LEAN startup in the world of startups really applied Deming's PDSA cycle as an example in very much service industries so it's a good point that this applies everywhere. 0:03:42.3 JD: Yeah. And basically what I tried to do with the 14 Principles in my 'Win-Win' book was just basically just translate the language from, sort of, manufacturing or sort of, industrial language to education sector language. So I actually literally created a crosswalk where I said here's Demings Point 1 and here's how I'd frame that for school people. And so that's, sort of, what I'm taking folks through in this most recent set of episodes. So thinking about diving in here. Principle 2, sort of, the short name is Adopt the New Philosophy. The descriptor, sort of, is Adopt the New Philosophy: Systems leaders must awaken to the fact that education reform movements often lack a sound philosophical foundation, must learn their new responsibilities and take on leadership for improvement. So this, sort of, goes back to this idea of what came out of A Nation At Risk. What was the next steps? What was, sort of, the response? And what I'm saying is that was probably the wrong response and instead we need to Adopt This New Philosophy. That's what Dr. Deming is calling us to do. And that's his point too and I've translated that for education folks. 0:05:01.8 AS: And just for clarity purposes. This principle number two and, you know, what Deming's talking about Adopt the New Philosophy is a very kind of a general statement yet it's maybe a specific stateme

In this episode, Bill and Andrew discuss the shades of variation: meeting requirements, accuracy, precision, and precision around variety. Is reducing variation to zero a good thing? Plus, Bill and Andrew share stories that offer practical ways to think about these concepts. 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 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. The topic for the day is The Paradigms of Variation. Bill, take it away. 0:00:28.1 Bill Bellows: Ooh. 0:00:28.1 AS: Exciting, exciting. 0:00:33.1 BB: Alright. So let me start off by saying this is episode number eight, and I wanna just make a couple comments about episode number seven, where we talked about "all straw" and "last straw" organizations also otherwise known as "me" or "we" organizations, or red pen or blue pen companies. And I just wanna burst a bubble and say neither one of them, neither organization exists, whether it's all or last or me or we. I view it as a... It's really a matter of which direction your organization is moving, it's a really simple model that I've seen get people to begin to appreciate what Deming's talking about, because I think that contrast is very much like a Deming organization versus a non-Deming organization. But instead of black-and-white thinking, there's really a continuum, and so I think... I just want to say at the beginning, it's really a question of which direction is your organization moving? Another thing I wanna throw out is... I don't think people know, I think absent an understanding of the System of Profound Knowledge, if you're in a last straw organization or a me organization, or a red pen company, I don't think you know that. I think if you become aware of Deming's work, you become aware of what could be. And I liken it to Dr. Deming saying, "How could they learn? How could they learn? The answer is frightening, how could they know?" So I think absent an understanding of The New Economics - Deming's work, I think it's hard to appreciate what you're missing. 0:02:11.4 BB: That you're being blamed for the grade, you're being blamed for the red beads. You're being blamed for the weather, if you're the weatherman. And the other thing that comes in mind there with that, "how could they know" is... There's a great video with Peter Senge, which he did a case with Dr. Deming, and there's a blog I wrote about it on the Deming Institute website if you just search for Peter Senge and my name. And you can find the blog as well as the link to the video. And in there Senge is talking about the present state of education systems and very much in this contrast of industrial and post-industrial, and he says, very much what it comes down to is, he says it's the water. He says, "We don't know what fish talk about, but you can be damn sure it's not the water." And likewise, I think people in a red pen company are not getting together. You and I talking about, "Andrew, this system sucks. I'm being blamed for the red beads," and I don't think we're the wiser. Now, if you turn me on to The New Economics. And we started listening to DemingNEXT and we became aware. But absent that, I think we're both frustrated, but we wouldn't know better. Alright, it's on the topic of variation. 0:03:30.8 AS: It's... 0:03:31.5 BB: Go ahead Andrew, you wanna say something? 0:03:32.4 AS: I was just gonna say that... That's where I think Dr. Deming's making the point of the difference between training and education. Education is the idea of bringing outside ideas into your mind, into your business, as opposed to training, which is trying to upgrade skills. And I had a little story of that when I was a head of research at an investment bank in Thailand. The whole job of a head of research is managing all these analysts who are writing research reports on company A, buy company A, sell company B for our institutional clients. And the job of a head of research is to try to manage that schedule. And you know that analysts are always gonna be interrupted and clients are gonna call, the market's gonna do this. So they're very rarely on time when they say that they're gonna finish something. So you're constantly scrambling for the morning meeting, because on the morning meeting you gotta have a story. 0:04:22.0 AS: And so that was just the job of a head of research. So I did that really well, managing them and, kind of, all that. And then I went to the number one investment bank, the number one broker in Thailand as the head of research. And I asked them, "So how often do you guys miss?" And they said, "Never." I said, "That's impossible." Because I've spent my whole career managing the flow of analysts. They said, "No, we never miss." When an analyst is gonna be on, they'

In this episode, John and Andrew shift from management myths (don't do this) to principles for transformation (do this instead) based on Deming's 14 Points for Management. This episode introduces the principles and the context you need to get started. 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. The topic for today is shifting our focus from management myths to principles for the transformation of school systems. John, take it away. 0:00:31.8 John Dues: Yeah, Andrew, it's good to be back. It's good to make this shift from the sort of the "don't do this" to the "things that we should focus on" as leaders of our systems, whether it's in business or education or whatever. And just as sort of a recap, we did these three episodes on management myths, and I think I made this point where sort of the common thread amongst all those myths is that they suboptimize our systems. I think the key thing to look for, whether it's sort of something we should be doing or whether we should not be doing when it comes to management practices, is does the thing, whatever that practice is, does it fragment the whole into parts and fail to appreciate the organization as a system? I think that's sort of the key differentiator between what I would call management myths, and then the things that we should be doing, some principles that we should be following. And I think that Deming philosophy is the opposite of the management myths. 0:01:33.0 AS: It's so tempting to fragment... I like what you said, fragment the whole into parts and optimize those parts. That is just so natural for us in some way, that it's manageable, it's accountability. And what you've taught us is that well, actually it produces a suboptimal result for the system. So I think, it's exciting to move into like, okay, now I understand that, so what do we do? 0:02:06.4 JD: Yeah. And I think with the myths, a common...sometimes people are gonna push back, obviously and it can be hard to wrap your head around the myths because they're often common practices. That's how we're often trained in business schools or schools of education. But if you sort of start to unpack and say, "Okay, you say that practice is working in your organization, but tell me what you hear when you talk about a particular practice, let's say merit pay for example?" "No, that works for us. That works for our organization." But then you start to say, "What do you hear around that particular system?" And I think a lot of times people start to say, it sort of dawns in them that, oh yeah, departments are competing against each other. Well, we sort of go around the rules to do X, Y, and Z so we can get the reward. And when you start to sort of think about those things, you can see how those myths sort of lead you in the wrong direction and you wanna sort of steer towards these principles that guide you in the right direction. 0:03:03.7 JD: But I think it's important to understand those myths and then take that next step, that next step to follow the principles that Dr. Deming talked about. Of course, many people that follow Dr. Deming's work are familiar with his famous 14 Principles for Management. I basically took those 14 Principles and translated them into sort of a language that's closer to what education folks are used to. And really what I think they do is they provide this sort of strong philosophical foundation. The management myths, again, are the don'ts, the principles, the guiding principles are the dos. But I think it's always good to steer it back to sort of these central ideas, quotes from Dr. Deming or someone else that captured the essence of what you're trying to do. And I thought one of the Deming quotes that stuck with me when it came to transformation is that Dr. Deming said, "The transformation will release the power of human resource contained in intrinsic motivation." 0:04:14.3 JD: And so, a lot of times people talk about transformation, but what do you actually mean? And to sort of put it simply in the Deming world is: transformation is a process where you begin to understand the System of Profound Knowledge and that helps you pull away from this prevailing system of management, the management myths that we talked about, like accountability, or merit pay, or a number of the other things that we talked about and move to this new philosophy. That's where the transformation is actually happening. And again, these guiding principle... 0:04:47.5 AS: You said release the power of human resources contained in intrinsic motivation. Is that what you... Did I get that right? 0:04:53.1 JD: That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I said... 0:04:54.5 AS: Incredible. 0:04:55.5 JD: The transformation will release the

David and Andrew discuss the three types of power that leaders have: authority, knowledge, and persuasion. David also explains where the current style of "command and control" management comes from and what a nearly failed family vacation can tell us about power. 0:00:02.7 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I am continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. The topic today is the Three Power Rangers and Their Sources of Power for Improvement. We are now on item number seven on the list that was given to us by Dr. Deming in the book, The New Economics. It's called, the title of the list is called Role of a Manager of People. This is the new role of a manager of people after transformation. For those of you who have the third edition, this is on page 86, and for those with the second edition, it is on page 125. 0:00:56.7 AS: So now let's get into number seven. So we're talking about the manager after transformation. He has three sources of power. Number one, authority of office. Number two, knowledge. Number three, personality and persuasive power or tact. A successful manager of people develops number two and three, that is knowledge and personality. He does not rely on number one, which is the authority of office. He has, nevertheless, obligation to use number one, as this source of power enables him to change the process - that's the equipment, materials and methods to bring improvement, such as to reduce variation in output. Dr. Robert Klekamp says "He in authority but lacking knowledge or personality must depend on his formal power. He unconsciously fills a void in his qualifications by making it clear to everybody that he is in a position of authority. His will be done." David, take it away. 0:02:02.5 David Langford: Okay, that's great. So this is one of my favorite points, which has three subset points or Power Rangers, sources of power for improvement. And I've used this with managers around the world for the last 40 years. And in some cases, they just drop their jaws and they're just amazed at how simple this is. But the more you think about it and realize what people, managers of people are not doing, it gives a roadmap about: what do you do? How do you do something? And I get that question all the time from superintendents and principals in my field of education, and people that do have a formal position. Then they wanna know: well, how do I get these people to do stuff, make things happen? 0:02:58.2 DL: So, before we get into each of the three Power Rangers, I wanted to give a little bit of context too, because I wanna remind everybody that, Deming lived through World War II and was a part of the quality improvement effort for World War II. And what happened during World War II is that a lot of the manufacturing was being done by women in the United States especially. And so when the war ended, you had all these military people coming back to corporations and moving into top management positions, and basically the management style that they brought with them was military. And so that's where you got phrases like, "My way or the highway," and, "You're not getting paid to think. You just do what I tell you to do and everything will be fine." 0:03:51.5 AS: Attack that hill. 0:03:53.1 DL: Yeah, right, which was totally opposite to the whole manufacturing thing that had been going on during the war and was really the key to the war machine was being able to produce huge amount of military items in a very short period of time. 0:04:09.3 AS: Well, and also when you think about that, David, it's interesting to think about the patriotism and the commitment to a cause that those women went into those factories to do. And so when it was all done and the cause was met, the challenge was met, then to be faced with that, it's like, "Wait a minute, we lost something here." 0:04:30.9 DL: Yeah, and then I remember Deming talking about it one time at a conference and stuff and talking about, basically, in those factories, women liked to get together and talk about what was going on, and their performance and everything that was happening in the factory. And then when the men came back in, they said, "No, we're not gonna have groups or teams or anything like that. You're just gonna do what I would tell you to do, and if you don't like it, then find someplace else to work." One of the phrases I always remember Deming used to say was that: "pretty soon you're left with only the people who can't get a job someplace else." 0:05:14.0 DL: And I've found that to be so true in every profession that I've worked in or helped people with, etcetera, and have... So it leads us to number one, your formal position. So yeah, you have a job. You're the CEO, you're the principal of a school, you're

Learning Deming is like seeing the world through a different lens. In this episode, Bill Bellows uses various examples to show us how powerful that new vision can be. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:03.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. The topic for today is Vision Therapy. Bill, take it away. 0:00:29.9 BB: Welcome back, Andrew. Yes, I wrote an article, gosh, maybe 10 years ago now for the Lean Management Journal under the title Vision Therapy: Shift from Big Problems to Great Opportunities. And in the article, I talk about vision therapy - as getting glasses is one form of vision therapy or perhaps you need surgery on your eyes. I also talked about therapy our son once went through which is hand-eye coordination. And all of that is leading up to a vision exercise I put together 1998 timeframe and was inspired by a number of things. One is I had read a book written by David Kerns, former CEO of Xerox, and it's called 'Prophets in the Dark.' And he shared a story in there of a senior executive who had come from Ford. And he said, this guy named Frank Pip, who went on to become an outstanding leader within Xerox. If there was... I get the feeling if there was a hall of fame within Xerox, David Kearns would be in it. Frank Pip would be in it. 0:02:02.0 BB: And quite likely Barry Bebb, who's a mentor of mine, would be in it. And others, and... Anyway, relative to Frank Pip: Pip started his career at Ford and he got to the point of being a plant manager for the Ford final assembly plant. And there was an account he gave to Kearns of whenever they did final assembly of automobiles, rubber mallets were used to bang the mating parts together. They didn't quite fit. And every now and then, two parts would go together without a mallet. And the Ford, at Pip's plant, they called the parts that assembled without a mallet Snap-fit - everything else required mallets and mostly it was mallets. But every now and then there'd be Snap-fit. And then he explains how they, Pip was inspired to go off and buy competitor's cars for the purpose of buying them, taking them apart, putting 'em back together. And unfortunately, Pip died a few years ago, and I... And it never dawned on me to reach out to him. I thought by the time I heard of him, it was maybe too late then, it turns out I had plenty of time to reach out to him. So I don't know what inspired him, but I get the feeling he was routinely buying competitors' cars, taking 'em apart, putting 'em together, just alike, and they assembled just like theirs, just like theirs, just like theirs. 0:03:26.7 BB: And then there was a pickup truck they took apart, put together, and never used a mallet. It was, in Ford's language, 100% Snap-fit. And Pip was so astounded by the results he had the assembly team take it apart again and put it back together again 'cause he couldn't believe it was a 100% Snap-fit. Well, when he found that it was 100% Snap-fit twice, now he thought, "Holy cow," he calls up corporate, had someone come out from Dearborn, which was Ford's corporate headquarters, and I don't know if it was his boss, whoever the person was, came out very, very senior. And he says, they met with the team. The team's answering his questions. And as I explain it to people, you can imagine what it's like when somebody from corporate comes out. That's typically in my experience, somebody coming from corporate that's either, they're there to celebrate something or it's a bad day or it's a routine, but it... Anyway, it's a big deal for him. And as Pip's account was when the plant manager, when this executive came out from Dearborn and heard this account first hand, blah, blah, blah, his comment to the team was "The customer will never notice the difference." 0:04:38.1 BB: And in the book it said Pip was so frustrated with that attitude that he quit 'cause he thought, "We have uncovered something and this guy is treating it as no big deal." Well, then I point out to people that was the late '60s and which was at the beginning of Ford, I'm sorry, of Toyota selling cars in the States. It was a Toyota pickup truck. So I just... I shared this story in part for this term, Snap-fit. Well, then in the late '90s I was teaching a graduate class in quality management at the Kellogg School of Management, Kellogg Business School, Northwestern University, which I checked very recently. It's the number two business school in the United States. And I'm teaching a class there. Through some interesting occurrences, I was invited to teach this class there. And I wrote up this contrast between the very simple black and white model. And we've been talking black and white models and I was using a black and white model of org