Continuous vs Continual Improvement: Deming in Education with David P. Langford

In this episode of our special Deming in Education series, David and Andrew talk about the difference between "continuous" and "continual" improvement - and how that applies in classrooms.

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 am continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is: Should we be continually improving or continuously improving? David, take it away.

0:00:30.6 David Langford: Thanks Andrew. So some people say it's semantics and it doesn't make that much difference to how you think about it. And I think in the last podcast, we were talking about how people have trouble with the idea about continual improvement anyway. But the first person I ever heard really talking about the difference between continual improvement and continuous was Dr. Deming. And not only did he talk about it in his Deming way, he was pretty emphatic about it. And it took me a long time, I'd say 10 years or more, to start to really get it and understand the difference and what that means. But basically the difference is if you have some function of what it is you're trying to do, some program, some process, a manufacturing thing, a classroom or whatever that might be, and you're doing that process over time, continuous improvement means that you're just continuously changing things over and over and over and adapting and moving forward and changing forward. It sounds like a really good idea until you think about it.

0:02:01.5 DL: I don't think it's actually possible to do it unless you're in some kind of a mechanical machine world or maybe artificial intelligence kind of a world where changes are just constantly being made, adaptations and changes moving through. When you're working in systems like education, which is primarily a human system field, and yes, we have computers and technology and things coming into the education system now, but it's still primarily a human system, and my experience is that humans, whether thats students, teachers, parents, whoever, cannot adapt to continuously changing everything. Such like change upon change, upon change, upon change, upon change or sometimes you hear your teachers say, "What's the flavor of the month?" They don't really understand why they're changing anything, they just know that somebody up above is just changing it, then they're just going on with it.

0:03:08.6 DL: Whereas when you have a continual improvement kind of environment, Deming taught us about, you let the system run basically, because you have to understand the data, what is the system producing, and once you understand that data, understand the variation in the system, then you can do a PDSA process and Plan-Do-Study-Act and come up with a small trial method to figure out what could I change to get a significant difference in the system, and then start applying that in a larger and larger scale level. On human systems, those things take time, because it's the psychology of the people in the system, and you have to persuade people that what to do and etcetera, sometimes it can take... And especially in education, it could take years to make a transformation system like that, so people have to learn to, okay, we've gotten to a certain point.

0:04:17.5 DL: We're getting a certain level of quality. And you can measure that, anything you wanna measure that with. You can measure that in attendance records, you could measure that in test scores, you could measure that in happiness of students, you could measure that in happiness of parents or doesn't matter whatever you want. But once you get that baseline data and you start to understand it, and then you have to say to yourself, "Well, am I happy with what's happening now?" I always joke with the teachers, if you're happy and you know it, then clap your hands. You have to get to a state of equilibrium basically. You've changed, and so now you're not happy with the level of quality and you want to see a higher level of quality.

0:05:14.1 AS: So let me try to clarify for the listeners and for myself, the first thing that you're talking about is if you use the word continuously, it implies that you're continuously or constantly changing things. And that's not the objective. The objective is actually to stabilize things to some extent.

0:05:34.4 DL: Change for the sake of change. We're just changing stuff.

0:05:38.6 AS: I wanna see a continuous... Continuously changing systems here. No, that's not what we're after. And then when you mentioned about continually, then you talked about let the system run, the objective is to understand what's the output of the system by letting it run and letting it define itself as to what it's producing and then making a decision, do we take it to the next level, do we take it to or do we leave it at this point and say, "Okay, that's good enough for what we need for the ultimate aim of the system."

0:06:14.3 DL: I find it really interesting in some cases sad and disheartening that you have state systems, especially like in education and state legislators, and they just come up with new rules and regulations, and they have no idea about what the current capacity of the current system is or what the problem is. I'll give you an example. I was working in a district one time and they had an average of 94% attendance rate, I think at the high school, and all of a sudden, the superintendent came out with an edict said that they should be no less than 96%.

0:07:00.0 DL: Well, if you understand systems from a Deming perspective, you actually do want students to stay home at certain times, right? You don't want them coming to school when they're sick, and if you make the parameters so difficult that your life is gonna be terrible if you stay home, now you're gonna have kids come and they're sick, and now you're infecting hundreds and hundreds of kids, and now you got hundreds of kids not coming to school 'cause they're sick, because you are over-emphasizing this. On the other hand, in a continual improvement kind of environment, if you decide that, okay, we can do better, we wanna improve our attendance rate, well, then you have to start studying the quality of what you do, what's causing people not to show up or not to come when they can.

0:08:00.8 DL: Or if sickness is the number one problem, what can we do about it? I once worked with a school in Brazil, and they went to work on their attendance rate, found out that a lot of it had to do a sickness and everything else, so they changed their whole system, they put in more wash stations throughout the entire school. They set up all kinds of times for kids to come in and they wash their hands, and every time they came in from recess or interacting, they had a process where they went through the wash hands, they had signs up with flow charts that said, "This is how you wash your hands." There's actually a process to that or through that. Well, their sickness rate just went down to practically nothing because they put in processes and methods and stabilize the system at a much higher level, and so then most of the kids being absent due to sickness, were the new students that were coming in, and so it would take them some time to get figured out, "Oh, this is what we do around here, and this is why we do it, and everything." Change the system, you get a different result. Instead of what we've been taught to do is leave the system alone and then manage the dysfunction that it produces.

0:09:24.2 AS: And I think that Dr. Deming realized that you have limited resources.

0:09:30.3 DL: Yes.

0:09:30.9 AS: And so you've got to prioritize, and once you've gotten something to a point... And he also realized there's no perfection and there's no reason to go towards perfection, if that's not serving the ultimate customer. I was also thinking about... I was thinking about a way for me to think about this, so I wanna propose this and see what you think, David. So if it's continuously improving, when you say continuously, it means you're kind of demanding constant change, so you could think of the person that the boss saying, "Don't just stand there, do something." And when it comes to continually improving, you're trying to let the system run, make the decision if you're gonna go to the next level of quality, and therefore the person at the top is saying, "Don't just do something stand there."

0:10:21.4 DL: Yeah.

0:10:23.5 AS: Perfect.

0:10:24.3 DL: Think, study the system, start to understand what's going on, what are you actually trying to do, and do you really understand. We're talking about attendance, but do you really understand why students don't wanna come to school, and then are you actually working on those things or you just, "We are gonna punish them if they don't come to school. That's what we'll do." And so two tardies equals an absence and four absences equals this and 12 absences, you lose credit, and so schools put in the layers upon layers upon layers of these punishments and the crazy thing is, it doesn't work, never has worked. If it worked, we wouldn't have any students missing school, because we have these wonderful systems that prevent kids from missing school at all. What do you do as different? We were talking about quality as the answer to your problem, well, when you have a much higher level of quality experience going on in the classroom, and that's happening in every single classroom with every single teacher, and the joy level is really high, you actually have the opposite problem with attendance, you're actually encouraging people to stay home when they are sick, not to come. You actually tell parents, "Look