In Their Own Words

The Deming Institute
  • 5.0 (1)
  • Management
  • Updated Daily

Interviews with members of The Deming Institute community, including industry leaders, practitioners, educators, Deming family members and others who share their stories of transformation and success through the innovative management and quality theories of Dr. W. Edwards Deming.

  1. 16h ago

    A New Lens with Balaji Reddie (Part 9)

    What if the way you measure performance is actually making your organization worse? Balaji Reddie and Andrew Stotz dig into Points 7 through 9 of Deming's 14 Points: leadership as a Socratic act of asking rather than answering, why 'drive out fear' is really about removing the fear of telling the truth, and how breaking down departmental silos sometimes means one team taking a loss for the good of the whole. Along the way: KPIs, internal competition, and why they so often undermine the system they're meant to improve. The episode closes with Dr. Deming's own words: leadership carries a responsibility to make a difference. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Balaji Reddie, an educator and trainer in the teachings of Dr. Deming and quality management more broadly. Balaji, how are you?   0:00:17.3 Balaji Reddie: Oh, I'm fine this morning. How are you, Andrew?   0:00:19.8 Andrew Stotz: I'm excited. Last time we talked, we talked about points four, five, and six. We packed a lot into that one.   0:00:25.5 Balaji Reddie: Oh, yeah.   0:00:25.8 Andrew Stotz: I'm interested in what we'll get through today.   0:00:28.9 Balaji Reddie: Yeah, right. And as we logged off the last time, of course, I had a hard stop to be made because I had another engagement at the end of the hour that we had. But it occurred to me later on that I should have mentioned something more. So I thought I'll just do a quick recap about what we did the last time we met, and then we proceed from there on.   0:00:54.4 Andrew Stotz: Oh, that's neat.   0:00:54.8 Balaji Reddie: Best part about doing this is there is no time limit, right? So we're taking it easy to finish whatever we have. But here we go. So points number four, five, and six is what we discussed the last time. And point number four, working very closely with your suppliers, don't go for the cheapest, go for the best, and calculate life cycle cost and things like that. So, I should have mentioned a particular person at that time. This was the lady who was working on behalf of MIT CAES, Center for Advanced Engineering Study, they are the people who originally published Out of the Crisis and The New Economics. And if you know, The New Economics second edition came out in '94, March '94, after Dr. Deming had passed away. And that's when in my early days in the Deming world, and I was when the internet came in and I was sending out emails to people I knew, might've seen... Whose pictures I saw on the net, including Henry. Henry was... We started a correspondence first by what you call snail mail, if I may call it. And then when the internet came a year after we were corresponding, that's when we started corresponding on email. And that too, he was not very conversant with it initially. He had a secretary, and so she would send me the mail and I would send her the mail, and then... It was on her ID. And then slowly she, I think, left the British Deming Association, and then Henry was all on his own. And that's when email, then one after the other started sending. So I needed to cite some portions of the book, and then I got in touch with the Deming Institute, and Dave Nave used to look into the emails in those days. Dave Nave and, bless his soul, Bill Ratcliff, if you know, Dr. Deming's son-in-law. So, they guided me. They said that you need to speak to Elizabeth Dorenzo, the lady who edited the second edition of The New Economics, which came out in March '94. So...   0:03:10.7 Andrew Stotz: It's the one I have right here, second edition.   0:03:13.5 Balaji Reddie: Yeah. That's the one. Yeah. It had a different cover, by the way, but this is an, I think, the 2000 print. This is a 2000 print.   0:03:22.1 Andrew Stotz: Right.   0:03:22.9 Balaji Reddie: Yeah, they changed the cover in the year 2000. In 1994 to 2000, the cover was quite different. I have that. I don't have it with me right now. But she told me something very interesting. First of all, she said she was expecting twins at that time. And the joke was, what will come out first, the book or the twins?   [laughter]   0:03:46.7 Balaji Reddie: Because she was racing against the clock and trying to get that book published. And the one point she said that he kept working on, because she kept getting notes from Joyce and Cecelia Kilian, his secretary, typed out notes, handwritten notes, which he wanted to be put into the book, was on point number four. So he was working on that till the day he passed away, about different worlds, different scenarios of working with suppliers, especially the point which we spoke of, work towards a single source. And he said it cannot happen overnight. However, he said in certain scenarios, if all of them are offering the same quality, then you'd be a fool not to go for the cheapest among those, right? And he was giving his... Trying to be... So there were many... There's World 1, World 2. So if you have the book The New Economics, these appear in the appendix: World 1, World 2, World 3, World 4, et cetera. And later on I found that he also gave them these as handouts during his four days... The four worlds in which you work with your suppliers and so on and so forth. So, being very, very practical in the application of what he meant. So that was one. And point number five, of course, we spoke about that you need to constantly improve. But he also cautioned what he meant by improvement, because he said here that improvement is of course taking the performance to another level, but these were in a different sense. He said when people come to you with problems. And remember, a problem is something that you did not anticipate that could happen. So, be welcoming of problems, and you need to look at it as a ways and means of understanding your process better. So the spirit was more of that. That was point number five.   0:05:37.0 Balaji Reddie: And then point number six we looked at, training should be reconstructed from ground up. And he meant in both ways, training on the job and off the job training. But the main thing is, he said that you need to help a person as a part of the training understand how they're contributing to the entire system. Because when a person knows why, they always perform the job better. I think he gave some examples of what that meant. So that was the point number six. Now we get to point number seven, which gets really interesting. So let me just pull up what he had to say in the text of point number seven. So here we go. Right, this is four, five, six, and now we come to seven. Now he says here, "Adopt and institute leadership." And interestingly, in the mimeographed book, the word was "supervision." And then he replaced it. In fact, I have that copy of that book where his handwriting is there, he's scratched out "supervision" and written "leadership." So he had it in mind. The 1982 edition of the 14 points, he wrote "supervision" there. But let's understand why he wrote that word, because I saw that word even in Dr. Juran's book, the 1964 edition of his book called 'Managerial Breakthrough.' And both he and Deming came from the same era, right? And so obviously their understanding of the word "supervisor" was a person with "super vision." In other words, the person who would see things that the people inside the process or system could not see. He actually meant manager, leader, call it what you will, right?   0:07:31.1 Andrew Stotz: Right.   0:07:31.3 Balaji Reddie: And so later on, I think it was Bill Latzko who told Deming to use the word "leadership." And so in the 1986 edition, in Out of the Crisis, he brought in "Adopt and institute leadership." And he said the aim of leadership should be to help people and machines do a better job. And he elaborated this a bit more in the 1990 edition, saying, "Adopt and institute leadership for the management of people, recognizing their different abilities, capabilities, and aspirations." And then he adds, "The aim of leadership should be to help people, machines, and gadgets do a better job. Leadership of management is in need of overhaul, as well as leadership of production workers." So that's what he wrote in 1990. Then he says here, "Transformation in any organization will take place under a leader." Now, this is profound knowledge, when he reworded it. And we started with this, and that's why when we started this series, this podcast series, I started with 14 principles of leadership, if you remember.   0:08:33.8 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. We're back to leadership.   0:08:37.6 Balaji Reddie: Yeah. So what I had to say actually for point number seven is in that podcast, because he actually elaborated 14 principles of leadership as an elaboration of this point. And he says here, "The transformation in any organization will take place under a leader. It will not be spontaneous. How may he accomplish transformation? First, he has a theory. He understands why the transformation would bring gains to his organization and to all the people that his organization deal with. Second, he feels compelled to accomplish the transformation as an obligation to himself and to his organization. Third, he is a practical man. He has a plan step-by-step, and he can explain it in simple terms. But what is in his own head is not enough. He must convince and change enough people in power to make it happen. He possesses persuasive power. He understands people." So, in other words, profound knowledge. You saw people, you saw theory, right? And of course, the variation in the sense that when you're making this transformation, don't expect the system to behave in a predictable manner. Sometimes it'll behave unpredictably. So if you understand that and you know what to do in such circumstances, you need to be prepared. And when you get prepared, you can manage. As he u

  2. Sep 28

    John Willis: Why AI's Biggest Problem Isn't Technology

    What if your AI strategy is creating more risk than progress? John Willis joins Andrew Stotz to trace how Deming's System of Profound Knowledge shaped the way he thinks about organizations, learning, and change. From his early days building DevOps to the AI transformations he's navigating with CIOs today. Along the way, John connects Deming to fast feedback loops, explains why leaders keep mistaking a learning problem for a technology problem, and shares stories that never made it into his book, Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge.   A fresh conversation for longtime Deming thinkers and those just beginning the journey.   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 here with featured guest, John Willis. John, how are you doing?   0:00:15.7 John Willis: Great, Andrew. I was just thinking, I feel like that song, like I got my picture on the cover of Rolling Stone. Like, I'm on the Deming Institute podcast. Yay.   [laughter]   0:00:24.9 Andrew Stotz: We finally got you on.   0:00:27.8 John Willis: Yeah, yeah.   0:00:30.3 Andrew Stotz: Actually been a while and I wanna introduce you just briefly and then I'll let you do a little bit more of the introduction. But basically on Amazon, a book popped up and I was just looking at the date of that. That book popped up on, for me, it popped up on September 6, 2023 on Audible and I immediately bought it and I got the Audible book and the book's called 'Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge. How Deming Helped Win a War, Altered the Face of Industry, and Holds the Key to Our Future'. And I immediately got it. Didn't know you, listened to it, loved it. Later you reached out on LinkedIn and we started communicating and you were kind enough to send a copy of it, which I then went through in more detail. I love the book. I really highly recommend the Audible version because it's just fun. Because the book is opening up a whole new Deming lens, a whole new way from somebody that never met Deming, and I just found that fascinating. So maybe why don't you take a moment and introduce yourself to the audience so that people know who you are, where you've been, what you've been doing and what you're doing now?   0:01:41.4 John Willis: Yeah, no, no, great. I... So, yeah, I... I've been doing technology, usually high consequence business, regulated industry, banks, retail, the biggest of the bigs, where the technology is incredibly important. Right? And I've been doing five decades of basic technology transformations, and I'm kind of the person who gets bored real easy. So I've literally gone through, like, you name it, mainframe, centralized computing, client server, distributed computing, priority systems, the Linux Open systems, you know, owned infrastructure cloud, and I'm consider one of the founders of the DevOps movement. And now today, like the cliché that I am, I've been doing a lot of organizational strategy on AI. So I don't come in and tell you how to turn 4,000 developers into AI coders. I kind of tell your CIOs to slow down. Wait a minute. So, yeah, so my day job today is I'm... I think these days finally in my life I would call myself an author first. I've written a number of books. The one you did, I had... My last book was a history of 100 history, 100 Year History of AI. And... But I'm an advisor, so I sort of... I take inbounds. I don't really look for work. Usually it's a chief of staff for a CIO who either has worked with me in the past and hey John, we're underwater with AI. Can you come in? Or they hear something I've said or I do a lot of podcasts and then I'm sort of a quasi investor. Although I probably should listen to your stuff a little better because I'm typically... I'm one of those guys that like, if I invest in it, you go short on it right away. So... [laughter] But yeah. But, yeah, no, so... But my day job today is really, is doing research. I'm actually just sure, this probably opened up a whole another discussion. Maybe later but I'm writing a book about the history of quantum computing right now and that's been just fascinating. So...   0:03:41.7 Andrew Stotz: Yeah.   0:03:41.8 John Willis: But my day job is helping CIOs and large high consequence organizations try to shuffle through technology transformations.   0:03:50.7 Andrew Stotz: And for the audience there that didn't catch what you were saying at the beginning, it kind of dated you because you were talking about the song called Rolling Stone by Dr. Hook.   0:03:59.9 John Willis: Yeah, yeah, totally.   0:04:01.3 Andrew Stotz: Dr. Hook published this in about 1972. And here are the lyrics. "Wanna see my picture on the cover? Wanna buy five copies for my mother? Wanna see my smiling face on the cover of Rolling Stone?" So here...   0:04:12.8 John Willis: Totally. Yeah. There you go. Deming Institute. Yeah, no, great.   0:04:16.7 Andrew Stotz: And one of the things that I found fascinating was just how you came to Deming from a very different angle. I was lucky enough that my boss at Pepsi sent me to study with him and I did two different seminars. The last one was in 1992. So I was 24, he was 92, was gonna live about one more year. I had... I could literally reach out and touch the man and hold his hand and sit next to him. I got a great picture of me sitting next to him. And I was just a young guy with a fresh mind compared to the 500 guys behind me that were older that he was bashing at times. But tell us a little bit about how you stumbled upon this topic and why you decided to do what you did with writing the book?   0:05:03.7 John Willis: Yeah, no, it's sort of interesting. I sort of say that for the first, I don't know, probably from 1980, my first job was running five distributed large computer systems for Exxon Research and Production, basically the geophysics work, right, during the most hottest period of the oil industry. And there were people doing that part of variation and understanding, but that didn't sort of hit my world. I was supporting geophysical processing and then so I rolled into other jobs. And then probably the closest I came... So in other words, I'm dealing with a lot of these major transformations and always focusing on the meta side, like the organizational. What are the things that are wrong? How do we fix the human and technology? There's a phrase called sociotechnical systems, right? And that's always where I've been most interested. And then even I was at GE Capital and I'll say this with all honesty, I was a Green Belt, but they gave out Green Belts for Six Sigma, [laughter] right? My wife was actually a Black Belt. And... But we would do... And I know Deming hated Six Sigma and all that, but we were doing... It was all around me, right? And then it wasn't until really the DevOps age that we really... That was a major shift in my career because before everything was sort of first generational from a technology or sociotechnical system, very command control, you sort of you installed software in a certain way. There were so many principles that were being broken by DevOps. And I was already an older guy at that point, but I was learning from these young kids and I'm known as the person who introduced DevOps to the US.   0:06:52.3 John Willis: And... But so there is where we started going back and understanding... We thought everything was new. We were creating DevOps, we were doing all this crazy awesome stuff. And I remember a friend of mine, well, a good friend of mine wrote a book called 'The Phoenix Project' by Gene Kim and it's a rewrite of Eliyahu Goldratt's 'The Goal'. And I was like, oh my God. And I read all of Goldratt's books and I was like, okay, this is the way, this is the way. I've seen a glimpse of some 30 or 40 year knowledge that I was missing. And then it was an open space seminar. A good friend of mine says, "John, you know." and I'm going off about Goldratt and he's like, "You know this all goes back to Deming." I'm like, "Who's Deming?" I'm like, "I just spent a year learning everything I could about Goldratt. He is my North Star. And now you're telling me..." And he challenged me. He said, "John, I'll leave it at this. You go read Deming's 14 Points and if you don't... I know you. I know what you're gonna do once you do that." And he was spot on. That was it. I was... And I don't... I'm more into the Profound Knowledge and we could talk a little bit about my journey there. But I was like, oh my goodness, this is the real and I love Eliyahu Goldratt and I love 'The Goal' and I love all his books. But Deming was hitting... Was like punching me right square in the face.   0:08:12.0 Andrew Stotz: So to what gap did it close for you? I mean, Goldratt is very specific about the main limiting point...   0:08:23.2 John Willis: Yeah.   0:08:23.3 Andrew Stotz: The bottleneck, how do we solve this?   0:08:25.6 John Willis: So the 14 Points, sort of one of the jokes is that it's mandatory to put the 14 Points in a DevOps presentation. So we were doing that dance a little bit, but then when I got a little serious about it, actually me and Gene Kim, we did a book. Goldratt has this book called 'Beyond the Goal'. It's an audio-only book, right? And I convinced Gene about five years after he had written 'The Phoenix Project' to do a Beyond the Phoenix Project. And so he did Goldratt, I did Deming. And at that point, I knew enough about Deming to say, "Okay let's..." And then we talked about DevOps and the principles of Lean and we did... I always, when somebody says they bought that audiobook, I'm like, "Oh, you're the 15th person that bought it." right? But it sold more than that. But the... But that's when Gene tapped me on the shoulder and did that. We went to the studio. It was a highlight of my life, literally going to the studio with Gene and literally recor

  3. Sep 22

    A New Lens with Balaji Reddie (Part 8)

    What if your cheapest supplier is secretly your riskiest? Balaji Reddie unpacks Deming's Points 4, 5, and 6 with Andrew Stotz by exploring Deming's thinking on suppliers, continual improvement, and training. Why do strong relationships matter more than short-term savings? Why should problems be welcomed? Do people perform differently when they understand the purpose behind their work? Balaji uses stories to offer a practical look at what these three points can teach leaders today. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.0 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussions with Balaji Reddie, an educator and trainer in the teachings of Dr. Deming and quality management more broadly. Well, we've had some great conversations so far on various points of Dr. Deming's 14 points. I think we're gonna try to get four or five, four, five, six. Let's see how it goes. So, Balaji, take it away.   0:00:32.5 Balaji Reddie: All right. So, good morning, Andrew. So I think the last couple of times we were together, we've spoken about point number one. I think the first thing I did say is that this is an entire system, so we can't isolate them. But he gave it some sequence and he gave it some structure. So... Is there disturbances that getting recorded?   0:00:54.3 Andrew Stotz: No. No.   0:00:55.0 Balaji Reddie: No? Okay. Right. So point number one, of course, was very much in sync with how he defined a system, where he said that every system must have an aim. Without an aim, there is no system. And when you read the commentary behind that, you see that it's not just aim what he meant was also purpose, the reason why a system exists. And so when we started seeing how he applied this to the running of an organization, that's why the first thing that crossed his mind was purpose. We, of course, discussed that in complete detail, what he meant by that. I think we also discussed about the actual text that he wrote where he said for quality and productivity and things like that. The second one, of course, how he changed the wording of point two, which was adopt the new philosophy. So when he first wrote it, it was philosophy of quality that comes first more than anything else. But when he professed Profound Knowledge, the wording changed to the new philosophy of win-win, right? Cooperate.   0:01:54.4 Balaji Reddie: And that's what we discussed last time, that cooperation in the broadest sense of the term with each other inside the company, with your competitors, with your suppliers, with your customers. And he says, "Teach and practice this." Those were the words. And the third one, of course, cease dependence on mass inspection. And it was a context in which he wrote it, but of course, he elaborated on that. You should understand why we use inspection. It is to keep us updated on what is happening in the process, not so much to sort bad from good. And that was basically, in fact, the wordings of the new point he wrote was understand the purpose of the system of inspection. He said there will always be inspection, but relying on that is not right. Using that to understand the process, that's the way to do it. So that's exactly what we spoke last time. Now we're taking it from there. Now talking about point number four, where... I'll just pull up the wordings for my sake so that I don't make a mistake in reading out what he actually said. Right? So the original wordings and then what it changed to later on, right? When he started professing. Now, so here's point number four, which goes like this. He says, "End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag alone. Instead, minimize total cost. Move toward a single supplier for any one item in a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust." And this did not change in 1986 or 1990.   0:03:39.1 Balaji Reddie: Now, he writes there in the commentary, which is taken from his text, "The aim in purchase of tools and other equipment should be to minimize the net cost per hour of life. Price has no meaning without a measure of quality being purchased. Without adequate measure of quality, business drifts to the lowest bidder, low quality and high cost being the inevitable result. Estimate the total cost of use of materials and services, the first cost, purchase price, plus the predicted cost of problems in use of them and their effect on the quality of final product. As the relationship between supplier and customer grows tighter and tighter, renewal of a contract year after year may appear to be a formality. This even tighter and tighter relationship will, under good management of producer and customer, ensure better and better quality and lower and lower costs as the years go by. A long-term relationship with a single supplier may be a wise decision if customer and supplier play their parts for optimization of the system. However, a sudden jump to a single supplier is inadvisable. There are risks. Go slow. It is not a relationship to enter into lightly. An overriding criterion is the supplier's burning desire to work with the customer on a long-term relationship backed up by a demonstrable store of specialized knowledge with management that is trying to adopt the new philosophy."   0:05:01.8 Balaji Reddie: And beautifully written. So the new wordings would now be, "Work towards having an arms-around relationship with your suppliers. Invest in them through education and training so that they can contribute effectively towards the organization. And when purchasing, do not focus on price alone without a measure of quality, and reduce variation by practicing cooperation with your suppliers." Now, coming to this, not many people are aware of what he spoke in Japan to the organizations there, but one of the major points he did say was to work very closely with their suppliers, right? And this text... The funny thing is, you know, about his works in Japan that he never gave any handouts or material, unlike Dr. Juran, who gave a lot of notes before he landed there. Right? Dr. Deming just handed out certain standards and just some pamphlets, I think Z1, Z2, and Z3, the standard copies. But what he spoke there was recorded by them. And the notebook, the book that came out, Elementary Principles of the Statistical Control of Quality, were essentially transcripts of what he spoke there. Right? It's later on when they showed him that they had made a book that he assisted. They expected him to get a little, I can't use a very strong word, upset, but that he would chide them for having done something without his knowledge. But instead, he was very happy, apparently, and added on to it and gave them the second edition and asked them to add an extra chapter and things like that. So when he went through those notes, obviously it was their translation of English to Japanese and then Japanese to English and things like that. But strong messages came out, and one of them was to work very closely with their suppliers and treat them as an extension of themselves, right? Extension of the company itself.   0:07:09.7 Balaji Reddie: Now, the thing about the lectures that he gave there, it's very interesting, that the arrow diagram, if you remember the famous arrow diagram which he drew there. If you see, it appears on Out of the Crisis in the new edition, page three, but the original edition, page four. But that arrow diagram in his mimeographed book, Quality, Productivity, and Competitive Position, comes on page number 103. And if you see the Elementary Principles of the Statistical Control of Quality, the arrow diagram is just directed towards the consumer. That does not have consumer research, right? And I think even he was... When he wrote... When the final edition of The World of W. Edwards Deming came out, the Lecture to Top Management, actually that was a lecture which he gave to the statisticians and engineers. To top management, there were two instances. One was July 1950 where he spoke to 20 people... Or 21 out of the 40 people who were invited. And then there was another one in August 1950. And August 1950, that took place at Hotel Diama, and that's where he added consumer research and completed the diagram. And that's the one he reproduced ever since in all his papers. But funnily, in The World of W. Edwards Deming, they've reproduced the first arrow diagram that he came up with, which did not have consumer research. It just shows the arrow pointing towards. But in both there, there was the presence of suppliers. Right? And he said that now... We used to have this group on the internet. It was called DEN, Deming Electronic Network, the D-E-N, the DEN, and we used to call ourselves the DENizens. And there was a gentleman, Jim Clauson, who used to... Who was a moderator and he had everything. It's unfortunate, I don't know where he is now. Not kept in touch with him. The last, I think, I interacted was many years ago.   0:09:16.7 Balaji Reddie: But all that... That's a treasure house of conversations, emails, which he has. Unfortunately, some cybersquatter hacked into the server and was asking for a ransom of $28,000 or something like that. And this guy didn't... He said, "Obviously, I can't pay that kind of money." So I don't know whether he's managed to retrieve all of that, because that's a treasure house. We used to have a lot of chats on that, and I interacted a lot with two very, very famous people who also worked very closely with Dr. Deming. One, of course, the great Myron Tribus, and the other one was John Dowd. And John Dowd... We had this chat and we said there is a difference between July 1950 and August 1950. And he took it on himself to find out what exactly was spoken in both these. Because July 1950, yes, Dr. Deming himself gave some notes and said, "This is what it needs to be." But August 1950, the people sitting there. So there were 80 people in that room. And I

  4. Sep 7

    Are You Learning or Just Staying Busy?

    If you've led an organization or a team for more than a few years, you've probably watched the same problems resurface again and again. Different initiatives. Different people. Same underlying issues.   In this episode, John Dues joins Andrew Stotz to dig into a puzzle Dr. Deming pointed to decades ago: "Experience without theory teaches nothing." John unpacks what Deming meant: experience doesn't come with its own explanation. It can answer a question, but only if you're asking one in the first place. Without a theory of why something works, all that hard-won experience just repeats itself. This episode is a great listen for anyone who has ever wondered why years of effort don't always add up to real improvement. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. The topic for today is why experience isn't enough, and it leads to a pretty interesting puzzle. If experience is such a great teacher, shouldn't businesses and schools and school districts just keep getting better over time? John, take it away.   0:00:42.7 John Dues: Yeah, thanks for having me back, Andrew. Yeah, I think that's exactly the question that got me thinking about this. When I think about my own experience as a school leader and people I've worked with over the years, once you've been, let's say, a principal for 10 or 15 years or a teacher or superintendent, you're a school leader or a teacher leader, you've probably observed hundreds or maybe even thousands of lessons. You've dealt with all kinds of issues, discipline problems, staffing challenges, parent concerns. You've seen curriculum come and go, state assessments change, new initiatives, budget decisions, all kinds of unexpected problems. And yet, I think organizations, complex organizations like schools, you can spend years wrestling with essentially the same challenges year after year, even as the initiatives change and people sometimes change and terminology changes, but a lot of times the underlying problems can remain really, really consistent. And so I started thinking, if experience naturally produces learning, why doesn't all of this experience that gets accumulated reliably produce better organizations? And then I was thinking about something that I read from Deming, who more than 30 years ago said... Probably more than 40 years ago said now, "Experience without theory teaches nothing."   0:02:24.0 Andrew Stotz: This one... That statement always kind of got me when I first heard it. Sometimes I listen to that, "Experience without theory teaches nothing." and think to myself, I know what that means. And sometimes I listen and I think, I don't really know what that means. And so it is kind of a provocative statement because I'm thinking about, well, how did I learn? Did I learn in my past? Are we talking about individual learning or are we talking about learning within an organization? And also, isn't experience the best teacher? So what do you think Dr. Deming meant?   0:03:02.2 John Dues: Yeah, it's like a lot of things I think that he talked about, you sort of have to stop and think. And even after you've thought about it once or twice, you can come back to it and kind of question yourself, "Did I really understand that?" You might have to go talk to somebody. But when I first read it, truth be told, as I was learning this stuff, I thought he had to be exaggerating. I thought the same thing: how could experience teach us nothing? I mean, obviously, like you were saying, we learn things from experience. But I think my interpretation is that Deming's point is subtler than that. I don't think he's saying, or he wasn't saying, that experience has no value. I think what he was saying is that experience doesn't come with its own explanation. Something happens in our classroom or our school and we observe it, but what does that experience mean? What should we conclude from it? What should we do differently next time? I don't think that experience can answer those questions by itself. And in 'Out of the Crisis', Deming wrote, "Experience will answer a question, and a question comes from theory." And I think that's really the key. I think experience becomes useful when we're using it to answer a question about how we think the world works. Again, in our classroom, our school, our school district, that type of thing.   0:04:27.7 Andrew Stotz: Imagine that you're a kid walking down the street and a pit bull comes running at you and bites you on the arm. It's not too serious. The owner manages to get them off you. There's an experience. And it's experience tied with an emotion, which means it's memorable. You'll never forget that. What could you learn from that? Can you learn from that? Does what you learn from that apply to other dogs? It just, it opens up a Pandora's box that I like to think about in that particular case.   0:05:11.8 John Dues: Well, and I think in a case like that, you go through an experience like that, you're definitely gonna have a theory the next time you run into a dog, what you're gonna do, right? Especially if it looks like a...   0:05:23.4 Andrew Stotz: Yeah.   0:05:23.5 John Dues: Yeah. For sure.   0:05:24.4 Andrew Stotz: And this word theory, most of the time we don't really use that in our daily life, but we have words like theory, hypothesis, guess, hunch. So what exactly do you think he's talking about when he says theory?   0:05:45.9 John Dues: Yeah, I think that that can be, for if you're not in academia, I think that that can maybe be one of the biggest barriers to understanding this idea. I think, kind of like what you're saying, when people hear the word theory, you often are imagining something academic or something abstract. But if you think about it, we're using theories constantly, no matter what our work is. And when I'm saying theory, I'm just talking about an explanation for how and why something works. So, really every decision I'm making as a leader rests on some theory. I'm thinking about, if I'm a principal and I decide that something like weekly classroom observations will improve instruction, there's a theory behind that decision. I'm saying really, by putting weekly classroom observations into my practice, I'm saying if we increase the frequency of classroom observations and feedback, then teaching will improve. Right? That's my theory. If a superintendent who's leading his district and they have some issues with reading and they purchase a new reading curriculum, there's a theory, if teachers use this curriculum, student reading outcomes will improve. And this could apply to any number of things. The leadership team of a school district changes the schedule, they restructure what staffing looks like across their schools. You add an intervention period to your school building, the state changes the teacher evaluation system, or the state launches an attendance initiative in response to this chronic absenteeism problem we've been seeing. Every one of these decisions reflects a theory about cause and effect, basically.   0:07:46.5 Andrew Stotz: And there's two things about theory that I like to do when I'm teaching. I like to ask a question that we could prove what the answer is. And let's just say, how many companies in the world have a strong level of profitability and growth relative to peers sustained over a five-year period? That's a very specific question and I have very clear definitions of all of that. And out of... Then I ask the audience, my students, out of 8,500 companies in the sample that I have, how many companies do you think have sustained this outperformance over five years? And then they make guesses as to what they think the answer is, and then I walk them through, here's how I tried to prove it. Now, you could argue that my... You'd define something differently or you'd do the test differently over three years or seven years. One student said, "Why not 10 years?" All of that. But in the end, I say, "Okay, my answer to that question is 400."   0:08:59.9 John Dues: Interesting.   0:09:01.0 Andrew Stotz: And so then that leads me to another step in the process. And what I'm trying to teach my students in Valuation Masterclass Bootcamp is the idea of how do you think like an analyst? An analyst says they come up with a theory or an idea, like, "I think some stock, stock ABC, is gonna double in the next six months." Okay, that's a theory, and you're gonna put money down on that theory. You may try... You need to try to support it with evidence and all that, and then in six months, if you didn't write it down, you'll probably forget it or you'll misremember it.   0:09:37.7 John Dues: Yep.   0:09:38.3 Andrew Stotz: So the question isn't really whether leaders have theories. I think we all have theories, and we're acting on these theories. So where do we go from there?   0:09:49.9 John Dues: Yeah, I think what you just said is exactly right. The question is, I think, whether those theories are explicit enough to examine. So you talked about writing it down, that's a common misstep. We don't write our theories down. I think most of our theories are implicit. We don't say, "Here's my theory about how this system works. Here's my theory about how this classroom works. Here's my theory about why weekly classroom observation will work to improve instruction." We just sort of act, and then something happens. Sometimes the results improve, sometimes they get worse, sometimes nothing really changes. Probably a lot of the time it's that. And then typically what we do is tell ourselves a story about why that outcome happened, whichever one it is, right? And that's, I think, where experience becomes particularly

  5. Aug 31

    A New Lens with Balaji Reddie (Part 7)

    What did Dr. Deming really mean when he said to "cease dependence on mass inspection"?    In this episode, Balaji Reddie and host Andrew Stotz unpack why one Ford manager's decision to fire his inspection team missed the point entirely. They explain how inspection can help leaders understand and improve the process, rather than simply sort good from bad.    They also explore why Deming's 14 Points must be understood as a system, including his evolving call for cooperation and win-win thinking among employees, customers, suppliers, and even competitors. Whether you are new to Deming or have studied his work for years, this conversation offers a sharper way to think about quality, systems, and improvement.   TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.0 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with Balaji Reddie, an educator and trainer in the teachings of Dr. Deming and quality management generally. Balaji, how are you doing today?   0:00:25.1 Balaji Reddie: Oh, I'm doing good. We're meeting after a small little gap, and in the interim I think a few things happened. One of the major things, I think you and I were really happy to see that Bill Scherkenbach sent us a lovely photo. So Bill, if you're listening to this, thank you so much, of course we thank you for the photo. We mentioned the last time or rather when we were speaking that I said that there used to be a group of people that used to meet over the weekend. I don't know what the actual protocol was, but all of the so-called core Deming people, you know, like Gipsie Ranney and Nida Backaitis, I hope I'm getting the names right, Barbara Lawton. And I remember Henry Neave saying he was a part of that. So I didn't see that in the photo. So, maybe one of the weekends he was there over in America and so he was there because he mentioned this. And so Bill very kindly said what it was christened. It was christened the Cosmos Club. And then he shared a photo. So Bill, thank you so much. And also helping us identify most of the people in that photograph. If sometime we could share it with the Deming Institute, if they could show it as part of the... If ever we convert this into some kind of video later on with some slides and things like that, they could add that in.   0:01:53.0 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, it's still wonderful.   0:01:53.7 Balaji Reddie: That was wonderful. Yes.   0:01:54.9 Andrew Stotz: It's a great picture. In fact, I'm gonna just make sure that I download it for today's episode.   0:02:00.9 Balaji Reddie: Yes, yes.   0:02:01.7 Andrew Stotz: Because I'll supply it to the Institute and ask Bill if we can use it. Let's see.   0:02:08.4 Balaji Reddie: Yeah, I mean, I presume that he would want us to ask, but he is very big-hearted. I think he wouldn't mind at all.   0:02:14.7 Andrew Stotz: He looks like a spring chicken in that picture. [laughter]   0:02:17.2 Balaji Reddie: Oh, yeah, all of them. There was Joyce Orsini too there. It was nice to see the whole jing-bang gang, as they call them, [laughter] the Cosmos Club. But wonderful. So, yes, so last time we were discussing point number one and we saw his interpretation in the broadest sense of constancy of purpose. I shared also what he was saying towards the end of his life that he said, "Create and publish the statement of the aims and purposes of the company or other organization." So he was envisioning that it's no longer one company. It's a family of companies working together. And so there has to be something that binds all these companies together because today's business is very complex. The family is actually globally dispersed. And so there has to be a common thread that links all of these organizations together and that has to be the statement of purpose. Why do we exist? Each could have their own, you know. Because that's what Deming said in the word interdependent components of a system. And interdependent means being independent and mutually dependent simultaneously. So independent does not mean isolated. It means autonomous, that means you go by yourself. You could have your own purpose, but you need to align it with the purpose of the companies you're actually contributing to, which is amazing. So he asks us to look at it that way. And he said that the purpose should be to impact people in the broadest sense of the term. And you, in fact, brought that up, that quality, and we saw what he meant by quality. And then I think we discussed the purpose of educational institutions, et cetera, et cetera. What should they be?   0:04:07.5 Balaji Reddie: So that was point one. Now we get to point two. And I'll start with the original wordings which he wrote in 1986. So let me just pull that up here. He says here that, "Adopt the new philosophy. We are in a new economic age." And then he very specifically states, "Western management must awaken to the challenge, must learn their responsibilities and take on leadership for change." Now, let's look at it both ways because in 1990 he reworded this completely. But let's get back to what he meant in 1986, the new philosophy. Now, what was the new philosophy? What did he mean then? Recently I heard, or I think I saw, Dr. Joseph DeFeo, that is the current CEO of Juran Institute, release a version of the 14 points, or rather saying that these were Dr. Deming's 14 points. And I saw what he wrote there about point number two, which was his interpretation. Now, when I look deep, actually, it looked more like Dr. Juran's interpretation of the 14 points. Incidentally, talking about Dr. Juran and the 14 points, it's no secret that Dr. Juran always said that Deming did not speak much about management, he spoke only about statistics, blah, blah, blah. But there was, if you know, part of the inner circle of Dr. Deming was Dr. Myron Tribus. And Myron Tribus, if you know, was a director at MIT for some time, right? And around the time Deming was there at the Center for Advanced Engineering Study. And when... He, of course, went and met Dr. Juran to speak to him about the 14 points, and then they had a discussion for half a day on the 14 points, and Dr. Juran agreed with every single one of them. He said, "Yeah." He said, "He's spot on." But then he said that he never spoke of management then, and so he stuck to his version that he taught statistics to the Japanese. Anyway, let's leave that aside.   0:06:19.0 Balaji Reddie: But when he spoke about point two, and that's what Juran's interpretation was, that the new philosophy was quality should be the basis for running a business. That was the new philosophy, right? And he said that top management, of course, Deming always said that top management should be involved because unless that happens, nothing happens inside the company. So the new philosophy, what now we interpret is what Dr. Deming was trying to say in 1986, was "quality is the basis for running an organization," right? And quality, again, what we discussed last time, in the broadest sense of the term, not just of a product or a process, but the way you conduct yourself as a business, as a people. So that was the new philosophy. And he said that you should take on leadership for change, and he aimed it at Western management at that point in time, right? So that was the 1986, and he goes on to explain that, saying that we are living with commonly accepted... Because he was trying to shock the Americans at that time, right? If you try to realize when they woke up to quality in the 1980s, primarily to be... I mean, to their credit, to the American businesses, that they were doing a lot of course correction. They realized that they had done things wrong for 20 years, and a lot of course correction started happening, and they started seeing benefits. So they started interpreting that as improvement when actually it was just a correction. And I think Deming wanted to bring in that shock treatment to them, and he said improvement is not enough, right? So at that point in time, that new philosophy was basically that, okay, you're doing it right, but it's not enough. And that's why it has to come from the top. So top people have to be involved. And that was how they interpreted this.   0:08:12.1 Balaji Reddie: And we also looked at it that way. But in 1990, he changed the wordings of the point two, and that was in light of what he had started professing, which was a System of Profound Knowledge. So I'll just read out what he wrote in 1990. He says now, "Adopt the new philosophy of cooperation and win-win, in which everybody wins. Put it into practice and teach it to your employees, your customers, your suppliers, and" why not "your competitors." So that was, I think, the new philosophy. Much of the stuff, if you start seeing, Andrew, when I look at all the 14 points, the 14 points have to be interpreted through the 14 points.   0:09:06.7 Andrew Stotz: Right.   0:09:07.8 Balaji Reddie: You need to understand the purpose of each point. You need to understand that they're a system. And that's why you can't just read them sentence by sentence and want to implement them, if you know what I'm trying to say here. They're a system by themselves. So you need to interpret them the right way and through the 14 points... I don't know if I'm making sense to you, but that's exactly how these are. He wanted it to be that way. So you can never tell that you've understood it completely. You're getting me? You're learning something new about it every single day. And as you start looking at things around you through the lens of Profound Knowledge, you will see things differently. And sometimes you see some gaps with the sentences that Dr. Deming was uttering, and then you say, "Okay, okay, this, this, this, I understood it now. I need to make this correction." Right? And so you can never say that I've completely understood them. I mean,

  6. Aug 24

    From Teacher to The Deming Institute Leader: Jake Rodgers' Story

    "Once you see it, you can't unsee it." What starts as a teacher's search to reduce conflict can become a lifelong journey in leadership and transformation. In this episode, Jake Rodgers shares how discovering Dr. Deming's philosophy changed the way he thinks about teaching, leadership, parenting, and work. From fifth-grade classrooms to leading The W. Edwards Deming Institute, Jake reflects on the lessons, challenges, and breakthroughs that shaped his path. Along the way, he explores why Deming's ideas still matter, how leaders can create more joy in work, and why understanding systems helps us make better decisions for people and organizations alike. A thoughtful conversation about learning, leadership, and what happens when you see the world through a different lens. 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 here with featured guest Jake Rodgers. Jake, are you ready to explain your Deming journey?   0:00:18.0 Jake Rodgers: Absolutely. Yeah. I'm so glad to be here.   0:00:20.8 Andrew Stotz: See, I already made a mistake right from the beginning, Jake, so you don't have to worry at all. [laughter] Let me introduce you to the audience. Jake Rodgers is the executive director of The W. Edwards Deming Institute. He's an educator, leader, and consultant with more than 20 years of experience as a teacher, principal, superintendent, and leadership coach. Jake, really, this has been long overdue to get you on the podcast. I think, everybody wants to understand your Deming journey, so take it away.   0:00:53.6 Jake Rodgers: Sure. Thanks, Andrew. It's so good to be here. This is actually my first podcast and first podcast with the Institute. And like you mentioned, long overdue. So I'm excited to be on here with you, and hopefully it's the first of many.   0:01:10.1 Andrew Stotz: Agree.   0:01:11.1 Jake Rodgers: Yeah. Okay. So how did I encounter Dr. Deming's philosophy? I've told this story a couple times, actually. Once at a Deming in Education conference back in 2015. But I was a fifth grade teacher back in 2008, I think it was. And we had just started, we had redesigned our system for how we support kids, who needed additional intervention, math and reading. And we had all the pieces in place. But once we got things going, the whole psychology piece was tough. We struggled with direction in meetings. There was quite a bit of conflict, even among people that were very good friends. We just couldn't get much done in the times that we were trying to figure out what do we do when kids need extra support?   0:02:23.9 Jake Rodgers: So I reached out to our principal, who said, "Hey, if you can find something, we'll pay for it," which is rare in education, increasingly rare. And I came across David Langford. Someone had referenced him, so I didn't know much about what he did, but we needed help. So I just called his office and he returned my call, and I told him a little bit about what was going on, and he said, "Oh, well, I can help you with that and a whole lot more, too." And I wasn't really interested in the whole lot more. I just wanted to stop the arguments and the conflict.   0:03:11.7 Andrew Stotz: That sounds like the alcoholic going to an AA meeting. "Look, I don't need all of that. I just want to stop drinking."   0:03:18.3 Jake Rodgers: Yes. That's all. Yeah. So, gosh, it wasn't too long after that a small team went out to Montana, and went to one of David's four-day conferences. And it totally transformed the way I thought about teaching, learning, leadership. It was a very memorable trip, because of the conference that David ran, but also with the four of us, we stayed up until 1, 2 o'clock in the morning every single night just talking about what we heard that day and what the implications were for the work we were doing. The things that stood out to me the most were bringing joy and meaning back to learning, getting kids more involved in designing, redesigning the classroom system, their learning. One of the great things that David does, he has, along with in his seminar going through the System of Profound Knowledge, he has a lot of tools that he teaches you to actually do the work, right? And so we went back and we started trying stuff, messed up a lot. I called David a lot, got some what he calls quality therapy, and eventually got a couple other team members involved. So our entire fifth grade team started doing this work. And after, I don't know, probably after two or three years, we started to see some good results. And during that time, I had gone back to school to get my principal accreditation.   0:05:17.2 Jake Rodgers: And I remember people telling me, "Jake, you need to, right after you're done with this program, you need to get a job as a principal, because if you wait too long, people will think you're unhireable." But I couldn't stop doing the work with my team, because we were having fun, and I think the kids were having fun. We were seeing some results, and it was something I wanted to get better at. Around maybe a couple years after that first conference, well, during that time, we had David out, and he did a couple more seminars with our school and then with a couple other schools in the school district. And then I got connected with the Seattle Area Deming Study Group, which was co-facilitated by Dave Nave, who I'm sure some of our listeners know, and also Al Viswanathan, two great mentors. Darlene Suyematsu, who used to work at the Institute, was also a part of that. That was a fantastic learning experience. That's the first time I read The New Economics.   0:06:40.0 Jake Rodgers: And I think, I had a fun time learning about how this applies outside of education. And I think the folks there at the study group also enjoyed trying to think about how does this apply in a fifth grade classroom or from a school leadership perspective. And then, I ended up moving to a new district, got a job as a principal, thought, "This worked so well with kids, adults are just going to eat this up." And they didn't. We had some definite bumps along the road, got some harsh feedback my first year.   0:07:28.4 Andrew Stotz: And when you say adults, what... Describe those who it was that you're talking about. What type of adults?   0:07:35.4 Jake Rodgers: Yeah, it was the teachers, the staff, support staff. It was a hard first year, for sure. When you're a teacher, you always think, "Oh, I could do that job as a principal better than they're doing it." But once I stepped into that role, I just had tremendous respect for the pressure, managing and leading change with a lot, you know in the public education system, there's a lot of required inputs, and so managing those in a way that, and a lot of them are antithetical to Deming's teachings. And so trying to protect staff and kids from some of the things that he would say do harm. Performance evaluations were one of those things that were a requirement. We had school-level evaluations from the state on how you're doing, and you get a report card and you basically get graded. And then your superintendent...   0:08:55.6 Andrew Stotz: Ranked.   0:08:56.9 Jake Rodgers: Ranked, absolutely. Yep. And then your superintendent comes in and says, based on the last data point, you need to do this, you need to change. So trying to navigate that constant pressure was tough. And yeah, like I said, I ended up having a lot more respect for people in that role. I remember, the first day of school, a parent walked into the office who did not speak English. They were Spanish-speaking and they were extremely upset, crying. And I had to find somebody to interpret. And turns out somehow their kid had gotten lost at the end of the day and we didn't know where they were either. I mean, long story short, the student went to the wrong place. We found them, all was fine, right. But I remember in the middle of that walking, I had to walk out of my office to, I think, use the restroom or something, and I just looked in the mirror and thought, "What have I gotten myself into here?"   [laughter]   0:10:07.1 Andrew Stotz: It's like you're responsible for everything. Like the buck stops here.   0:10:11.4 Jake Rodgers: Yeah, exactly. But that, as kind of a side note, that actually ended up being a tremendous opportunity. We used some tools with a number of the Spanish-speaking families, learned that, and they were a significant part of our population, 20%, 25%, and had grown quite a bit quickly over the last couple years before I got there. And we had learned that they just didn't feel like a part of the community. And so the system hadn't adapted yet to that change in the community. And so it was a cool opportunity to showcase how the use of some of these tools that we had learned from David and that are common in the quality world, how it raised the voice for people who weren't feeling heard in the community, gave them a lot of agency and autonomy to create some programs that helped the rest of the community understand who they were, what they valued, some of their traditions. So that was kind of a first big success from a situation that was pretty difficult. It turned into a definite win. So anyway, we kind of kept working at things for a couple years. And then in my third year, some of the team members were starting to kind of pick up on the use of some of the tools. We were improving some pretty critical processes at the school. People joked a lot about how much I used flowcharts.   0:12:13.4 Jake Rodgers: That was a good sign that people were starting to approach it with humor as opposed to just avoiding it. And then I had that opportunity to present at the Deming in Education conference in 2015 and brought a couple staff members along. One of them who co-presented with me did a great job. And I think that

  7. Aug 17

    Why Strategic Plans Fail (And What Actually Works Instead)

    Why do good strategic plans so often fail to produce different results? John Dues joins Andrew Stotz to explore a simple idea: organizations do not run on strategic plans. They run on the routines leaders and teams follow every day. From meetings and priorities to problem solving and learning, those routines form the management system that shapes results. Listen to a practical conversation about strategy, leadership, Deming, and designing an organization that can continually learn. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:00.0 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. Well, John, your most recent blog post, you titled it "The System Your Organization Actually Runs." Interesting title. And it starts with a question that I think every leader has probably asked at some point, which is, how does this strategic plan actually change what leaders do on Monday morning? Why did you start at that point?   0:00:50.1 John Dues: Yeah, thanks for having me back, Andrew. I think the article kind of gets at a question that I've found myself asking over the years as I've led school systems. And I've seen a lot of different strategic plans, and I've seen a lot of different strategic plans at my own organization. And most of them contain worthwhile goals. Most of them are written by leaders that want to genuinely improve their organization. I think the problem is, it wasn't the quality of the goals. It was... After reading the plan, I often couldn't tell how the leadership of that particular organization was actually going to operate once the plan was finished, or how at least how it was going to operate differently. And this is true of my own organization. The plan would tell me or those leaders where the organization wanted to go but it rarely said like how that was going to happen, what was going to happen differently every day in order to get there. And what I eventually basically came to the realization that this wasn't just a minor oversight or omission, it was like the central issue. And so that realization really changed how I started to think about strategic planning, 'cause I do think that's an important component of running an organization, but it's not the management system itself. It's just the starting point basically.   0:02:22.7 Andrew Stotz: There's a great book on strategy that I like called Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt and he basically focuses in on how bad most strategy is, and it's just lofty statements and generalizations with very little action and trade-offs that the senior management or the leaders are really making. And so it just plops in people's lap like, "Here's a good-feeling thing." So was there a specific moment when that clicked for you?   0:02:59.4 John Dues: Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I think what I think of when you mentioned that book, which I haven't read, "Good Strategy Bad Strategy," I think there certainly is good strategy and there is certainly bad strategy. But what I most often was seeing is like pretty good strategy that maybe a consultant would write. Like we did a strategic plan with a consultant, a great consultant about a decade ago and the strategic plan that that work resulted in was great and useful in some ways. But by and large, it did end up in the sort of stereotypical fancy binding and all kinds of colors and graphs and stuff like that, but it was mostly sitting on shelves and closets. It really wasn't formatted like literally and figuratively, it wasn't formatted in a way that was going to guide our work on a daily or a weekly or a monthly basis. So that experience, and I went through a couple of those types of strategic planning sessions with consultants over the years. So then I was thinking about what's actually happening is that, well, if the strategic plan mostly gets shelved, what is it exactly that is guiding and running the organization on that day-to-day basis?   0:04:30.4 Andrew Stotz: Interesting kind of distinction between the plan and the day-to-day running. So let's answer that question. If the strategic plan isn't the management system, what is it?   0:04:45.9 John Dues: Well, I think one thing is some people might be familiar with the management system terminology and some people may not. It probably has a technical meaning for a lot of people that are doing this type of work. But whether you use that terminology, "management system," in your organization or not, every organization has one. And so when a lot of people hear management system, they may picture some type of software system or some more formal operating manual. But that's not what I mean when I say there is a management system whether you realize it or not. I don't mean something formal necessarily. I'm just talking about a management system as a simple collection of like recurring leadership routines that determine how the organization actually functions. So it's things like how are priorities established? When you have meetings, how are they run? How frequently do the meetings occur? What measures are the leaders reviewing on a regular basis? How are problems surfaced in the organization? How do decisions get made? How the information flows? How leaders learn whether the organization is improving. So there's all kinds of these routines, and in some places they are not intentionally designed at all. But some version of those things are happening in every single organization. And in a lot of places they sort of just simply kind of evolve naturally on their own over time. But the thing that's similar, and it's pretty remarkable, is that whether you're doing this deliberately or not, these become like powerful behavior shapers in the day-to-day of an organization. So I think the key thing is that people respond much more to that daily management system, those leadership routines, and those things reinforce more so like the behavior of people that work in an organization more than what leaders say is important or more than what is written in a strategic plan that people often sort of shelve after the initial rollout and don't reference back very often.   0:07:16.7 Andrew Stotz: This makes me think of a quote by a guy named Stafford Beer, who is a systems thinker, and he said, "The purpose of a system is what it does."   0:07:23.8 John Dues: That's it, yes. That is it in essence, yeah.   0:07:31.0 Andrew Stotz: And the meaning of this is like never judge a system by its stated goals. This is also what Rumelt is talking about in "Good Strategy Bad Strategy." Don't judge it by its stated goals or its mission statement or what its designers have intended it to do. Really, we've gotta judge it by what it does. So you're saying every organization already has a management system then?   0:07:57.6 John Dues: Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, I think that's probably the biggest idea I was trying to get through in that most recent blog post, this idea that every organization has a management system whether they call it that or not. So the question is not its existence. The real question is, is there any intentionality behind the design of that system?   0:08:22.2 Andrew Stotz: So to follow that up, if every organization already has a management system, why do so many strategic plans fail to produce different results?   0:08:33.7 John Dues: Yeah, I mean, I think from what I've seen is that the goals and maybe the tactics and the strategic plans change every three years or every five years depending on how your organization does it but those management routines don't. So you spend all this time creating a new strategic plan and you may even do some things differently for a short time period, kind of like when you make a New Year's resolution, but you kind of settle back into those natural patterns if any changes were made in the first place at all. And so if you're a leader, you kind of just keep holding those same meetings, you kind of keep looking at the same reports, looking at the same data, you make decisions in the same way, you respond to problems in the same way. New initiatives sort of get absorbed up into that old existing management system. And so these initiatives come and they go but the system really doesn't change, kind of just like what you were saying with that quote. And then because the system doesn't change, the results usually don't change very much either. I think one follows from the other. So I think this is why two organizations, like two school systems can have pretty identical strategies and then produce completely different outcomes. And the difference usually isn't the plan, it's that management system that sort of lives underneath the plan. That's kind of how I think about it.   0:10:06.8 Andrew Stotz: It kind of makes me think of like a military. An army is told by their leader, "We're gonna take that hill," and then a new guy comes in and he goes, "I'm gonna change the plan. We're gonna take that hill and that hill." And then a new guy comes in and he goes, "We're gonna take that hill and that hill and that hill." And all of a sudden there's no tradeoff, there's no letting go, there's no sacrifice. And when you don't have a clear tradeoff, you're basically saying that we've got all these resources and we can do all this stuff. So it's interesting because most people would probably say that the problem is execution.   0:10:44.7 John Dues: Yeah. And I think... I mean, you run a business. I mean, execution, obviously...   0:11:01.7 Andrew Stotz: That's hard.   0:11:02.7 John Dues: It's critical. It's very critical. But the execution, how that goes, the execution itself is shaped by that management system. And so I think if you want different execution, you have to de

  8. Jul 27

    A New Lens with Balaji Reddie (Part 6)

    What happens when an organization gets so focused on results that it forgets why it exists? Andrew Stotz and Balaji Reddie dig into the first of Deming's 14 Points, constancy of purpose, using stories like Harvard's answer to Deming's challenge to define a business and Indian manufacturers who pivoted to build PPE during the pandemic. This conversation may change how you think about success, profit, and the real aim of a business. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with Balaji Reddie, an educator and trainer in the teachings of Dr. Deming and quality management generally. I'm really excited for today's topic, which is the 14 Points. Take it away, Balaji.   0:00:27.5 Balaji Reddie: Thank you. Thank you, Andrew. So the last time we spoke, we had discussed all the four sciences that Dr. Deming put together. In a nutshell, we said his words, appreciation for a system. That means appreciating that there are no events, there are eventualities, and there is a huge myriad or a huge system of myriad components that create these outcomes. So we need to understand that. We need to appreciate the fact that these are all interconnected, interdependent, these components. Right. And we saw some other attributes that when they interact with each other, the cause and effect are not closely related in time or space. Seemingly disconnected events then turn out to be connected. There exist synergistic relationships. So you can't just straightaway say, "I know." You can say, "From what I understand or what knowledge I have right now about the system, I think."   0:01:34.7 Balaji Reddie: And you always dig deeper. Right. And that gave us the next thing, that the performance of any system, the outcomes are subject to Variation. You will never get the same outcome every single time. It keeps on fluctuating. And then we realize there is a difference between normal and abnormal fluctuations. The typical term that Walter Shewhart said was Variation, and Deming took that forward. He said, "Understand Variation." I would say learn how to think statistically. Right? And statistical thinking is about knowing when to act and when to leave a process alone. Okay. So we said understand the Variation, and you should know when to... There's that normal fluctuation, you would need to work on it continually. But abnormal fluctuation is a little easier to understand, isolate, and take immediate action. So the low-hanging fruit comes from the abnormal fluctuation, what he called as special causes or assignable causes, as Walter Shewhart said.   0:02:41.0 Balaji Reddie: And once you work on them, then your long-term work on the process continues. That never stops because it helps you understand the process much, much better. Right? But there you are faced with the dilemma sometimes. There's so many complications there, and you just need to understand them if you want to know completely what happens in a system. And that's why he said the complete knowledge is never... Is unknown and unknowable. But he said there's a way of doing that, and that's where the Theory of Knowledge came in. We needed to understand that we build upon what we have right now. We start asking questions, and you begin with theories. "I think, I believe." And once you start doing that, you start unraveling the mysteries of the system under study. And last bit here is all this, of course, he was speaking about man-made systems, organizational systems, which all this work is being done by people.   0:03:38.0 Balaji Reddie: And he said that's where the best part comes in. You can never do things all by yourself. You need to cooperate with others. Each one comes with their own theories, and each one has their own system of learning, their own way of thinking. So we need to understand that, whether you are employees inside a company, whether you are people outside the company contributing in the sense of suppliers, or people who are recipients of this in terms of consumers. So everyone, you need to understand people, that they're a part of this entire system. And that's where Psychology comes in. Of course, I used the word empathy. I said understanding them and on. And on a lighter note, I ended by saying that if you really want to sharpen your empathetic skills, you need to either understand your pet or a baby, because these are people who can't express what they want and you just have to have your own theories and then understand them better.   0:04:34.9 Balaji Reddie: But that's what we saw last time. Now we're gonna get to, funnily, what he espoused as his philosophy [chuckle] when he first presented it in the United States in a structured form, right? These were the 14 Points. Now, first of all, the 14 Points are not his philosophy, but they're 14 consequences of his philosophy. You can never really set out to say, "I'm gonna do these 14 Points." But when you start, how do I say, asking the right questions and want to gain Profound Knowledge of what's happening and start looking at things differently and start asking questions, the right kind of questions, just like I said, "What is the purpose of the system? What are the components? How are they connected? How do they work? What is happening right now? Does this normally happen? Is this abnormal?" And then, of course, what are better ways of explaining or expressing what I'm seeing right now?   0:05:43.9 Balaji Reddie: And then finally, taking help from everybody else and bringing their thought processes. When you start asking these questions and start structuring and understanding the organization much better, you eventually see the 14 Points. So they are consequences of his philosophy. They are not his philosophy. You end up with the 14 Points, you don't start with them. Right? Having said that, does that mean we just go through this and be done with it? I said, "No." Now let's understand how he structured these and why he structured it the way he did. Now, they are in no order of preference. In fact, I remember speaking to Bill Bellows about this, and he said when he asked Deming, "Which of the 14 Points are the most important ones? Where do I start?" and he said, "All of them." He said, "Where do I start?" "Start anywhere," he said. You could start anywhere, eventually they're all connected.   0:06:40.7 Balaji Reddie: So the 14 Points are a system themselves. They are all connected to each other. You could start anywhere and you end up with the 14 Points in any case. But since we have to follow a kind of the sequence in which he wrote them, which he presented them, I'm following that sequence to begin with. Now, I'm gonna start with the 1986 edition of the 14 Points, which are there in his book, Out of the Crisis. But in 1990, he updated the wordings of the 14 Points. So I shall pull up my document right here so that I can read out the 1990 edition. Just give me a minute.   0:07:36.0 Andrew Stotz: Just for the audience, go out there and get yours in your hand. Get ready. I'm just going through and getting mine ready.   0:07:42.8 Balaji Reddie: Yes, so. Okay, so here it goes. Let's get to the 14 Points. So here we are. Right. And in what I normally say here, that he often said too, that when you apply Profound Knowledge, the 14 Points help you apply this in the most structured manner. So here we go. So the first is the 1986 edition, point number one, where he says, "Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service with the aim to become competitive and to stay in business and to provide jobs." I think this is an amazing set of words which he's brought here, especially saying to provide jobs, where he said that quality is a ways and means of really contributing to society and not sucking the worst 10%, but adding something more to it to provide more jobs. Now in the 1990 edition, right, now the commentary for this, if you read Out of the Crisis, I've taken an excerpt from there, "Management must demonstrate unshakable commitment to quality, productivity and continual improvement.   0:09:09.8 Balaji Reddie: Your customers, your suppliers, your employees need your statement of constancy of purpose, your intention to stay in business by providing product and service that will help man to live better and which will have a market." So this was his definition of quality. A product or a service possesses quality if it helps someone live better in every way and enjoys a large and sustainable market. So for him, quality had two aspects. One, it must make someone's life better. Whatever you do, whether it's a product or a service, service being an activity. Right. So it should add value to the customer's life. It should make that person's life better. But it should be at a price the customer is willing to pay. Right? So that's the way he looked at it.   0:09:55.2 Balaji Reddie: Now, he changed this in 1990 to this, "Create and publish to all concerned a statement of the aims and purposes of the company or other organization. Management must demonstrate constantly their commitment to this statement." Now he says to publish the statement. And he says not just purpose, but aim. So aim, I think this came from his definition of a system, where he says that a system must have an aim. Without an aim, there is no system. So the aim provides a direction and purpose provides the reason why the system exists. So they go hand in hand. You can't separate these two. But now the commentary for this is, "A system must create something of value, in other words, results. The intended results, along with consideration of recipients and of cost, mold the aim of the system. It is thus management's task to determine those aims, to manage the whole organization towards accomplishment of those aims.   0:11:07.1 Balaji Reddie: It is important that an aim neve

See All (212)

About

Interviews with members of The Deming Institute community, including industry leaders, practitioners, educators, Deming family members and others who share their stories of transformation and success through the innovative management and quality theories of Dr. W. Edwards Deming.

Information

  • Creator
    The Deming Institute
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    212
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © The W. Edwards Deming Institute
  • Show Website
    In Their Own Words