How to Start Setting Operational Definitions: Deming in Education with David P. Langford (Part 13)

Now that we understand Operational Definitions (see Part 12), it's time to figure out how to use them to get the improvements and results you want. Andrew and David talk about examples of useful Operational Definitions and how they can impact all aspects of education (and beyond!)

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 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's topic is how to start setting operational definitions. David, take it away.

0:00:27.1 David Langford: So in a previous podcast, we talked a lot about the need for operational definitions, and how that improved systems, and why do you wanna do that. Well, that's part of what Deming talked about with profound knowledge and systems thinking, and it's really important. But the nuts and bolts about how do you begin doing that. Well, the first thing you need to do is to figure out what system am I working on, is the number one thing. What am I trying to improve or design? Am I trying to improve the system of behavior? Am I trying to improve the system of the learning in the classroom? Or whatever it might be. Or maybe you're a principal and all of a sudden you realize, "My teachers, they don't all show up on time to the staff meetings," Right? So staff meeting's supposed to start at 3:40, and we don't ever get a staff meeting going till four o'clock, so... I know when I go places and they're not getting started promptly, etcetera, I'll say things like, "What time do you usually start your eight o'clock meetings?"

[laughter]

0:01:42.3 DL: Yeah, it usually gets people to go, Oh, yeah... Sometimes they'll say, "Well, usually about nine o'clock, so."

0:01:47.9 AS: And, David, I have a story I wanna share that I think can kind of lead into this, is that I was involved with a master's in marketing program here, about 75 students every time. And then I'm also involved with a MBA, an executive MBA program with another university. And one of the things that's interesting is the master's in marketing program, 75 students, so these classes are big, pretty big, 75 students, not one of them was late, ever. All 75 were in the classroom, door closed, when it was time to start the class and I started. And the other one I was just meeting out there, and we were at an event where I was teaching, and they said, "Look, really sorry, we try to pull everybody together but they're always late," and all that.

0:02:31.4 AS: And I was just like, this is interesting, the difference here. 'Cause it's the same cohort of people, it's the same group of executives and smart people in Thailand that are pursuing a degree. And the guy asked me, and I told him the story about the other university, and he said, "How do they do it?" And I said, "Well, they set a pretty clear standard of, look, this is important to us that you're on time, and we're gonna lock the door, and if you're not there at the time that it starts, you can't go in until the break. And we're gonna get class leaders to support this, we're gonna get alumni to support this, to say, this is part of what makes us unique."

0:03:06.9 DL: There you go.

0:03:08.1 AS: And I saw a very different outcome.

0:03:10.7 DL: So there you go. That's an operational definition. And whether or not you agree with it or not, you can see by having that operational definition at the one university, you've got a level of function that you don't have at the other university, you got a level of dysfunction, because they haven't taken the time to really do that. Really define what does that mean? And so when that happens, then you're dealing with all this variability, variation from students, variation from professors, variation from everybody in the system, and the overall system is not optimized. So it just keeps coming back to what we talked about before, but in this session we wanted to get into a little bit about, how would you begin setting an operational definition? What does it look like?

0:04:06.1 DL: When I work with, say, elementary teachers, I say, start the very first day, the very first thing, so... And start operationally defining what kinds of standards and what kinds of things you wanna have happen. Something so simple about, "Every time you hand a paper in, we want you to put your name on the paper." Okay, well, let's have a discussion about, let's operationally define, what does it mean to put your name on a paper? And sometimes people look at you and say, "Hey, what are you talking about?" Well, do you want first and last name? You just want a first name? Do you want it in the upper left-hand corner? The upper right-hand corner? Do you want it just anyplace on the paper, you don't really care? Well, if it's just random, if it's just anyplace on the paper, but my name's on it, well, that means that you as the teacher, every time you get a paper you're gonna be searching, trying to find somebody's name, right?

0:04:58.9 AS: Does it need to be clearly written?

0:05:01.3 DL: Yeah. Yeah, and what is clearly? I have no idea what that means. So we might have to have a discussion as a class and start to talk about, what does clearly written mean? There are some things to that. Well, clearly written means all the lower case letters need to be the same height. Oh, okay. So I'm thinking about that and I say, "Is my name clear, all my lower case letters the same height? Well, no, they're not." Okay, well then I can fix that, can't I? Right? So you can get clarity around these things if you really are thinking like this from the very beginning of bringing people into a system. As things get more and more complicated, and let's say that you wanna have a whole group of people come to a common definition, or a common operational definition on something. I started a process years ago of, in my classes, working with students and staff too, but anytime we needed to define something everybody would write it down, and then we'd pass it around and start to share those definitions and begin to talk about it.

0:06:20.9 DL: But then over the years, that sort of evolved into a tool that we call... Nowadays we call P³T. P to the third power T. So what it actually stands for is, the P³ is the paper passing purpose tool. And that came from one of my students one time, he said, "Oh, this is P to the third power." And so we just named it that, and it's become a popular way to define things. But what you do with that... I've done this with school boards. They wanna define certain terms with the school board and everything. So let's do a P³T. So what you do is you take... You wanna get everybody's opinion without it being tainted by other people, you just start having a big discussion about how you should define something or you can take a vague word, like we talked about last time discovery, but you could take a word like behavior or discipline or anything you want and you realize that everybody's got their own definition of what that means, but to optimize the system, we all have to have a common definition of what that means.

0:07:33.6 DL: So you take all the people in a group, usually try to... If I've got more than about five or seven people in a group, then we'll break that up into multiple groups, so it might have... So let's say I'm gonna do this in a classroom, and I wanna get everybody in the classroom help contribute to an operational definition. We might just put everybody into groups of five to say eight people, and just start the process, and so then we state, "Okay, well, we wanna have a term on a quality work." There's a vague term, we want all the work...

0:08:14.1 AS: Good quality around here.

0:08:15.7 DL: Yeah, quality work, we want everything that comes in to be quality. So well, we better define what that is. So first thing I'm gonna have everybody do is write down their own personal definition of quality work, right, and they're gonna write it on this paper, and then very simply, everybody then just passes it to the right or the left, and when you get somebody's paper, then the first thing you're gonna do is read that person's definition of that term. Whatever it is you're trying to define, and as you're reading it, you're gonna automatically come to certain phrases or words where you have an affinity for that and you're gonna go, "Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree with that." So if you agree with that, what you do is you just underline it, okay, and so when you get finished, that paper has a bunch of things underlined and some things not underlined and then when you're finished with that, you pass it to the right and everybody keeps passing your paper around until you get your paper back.

0:09:14.5 DL: And if something's already been underlined once, then when I get it, if I also agree with that then I'm gonna underline it again, or if there's not enough space for that, maybe I'll put a check mark by it or just something that identifies that, okay, I agree with that, or I think that's a good idea, right? So when I get my paper back, I actually have the feedback from five to seven other people about what they thought about my definition, which is pretty interesting, right? Did I have a lot of people agree with me on certain things or maybe things that I thought were really important, nobody agreed with me on that, or nobody underlined that. They didn't think that was important at all. So you got all these definitions and papers, but you've got a chance for people to see everybody else's definition. And now we wanna start combining that into an operational definition agreement with the group. If you try to...

0:10:16.4 AS: And before we get to that.

0:10:19