In Their Own Words

The Deming Institute
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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.

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    A New Lens with Balaji Reddie (Part 1)

    What if the problem isn't your strategy, your people, or your tools, but the lens you're looking through? In this first conversation with Andrew Stotz, quality educator Balaji Reddie explains why so many organizations chase Deming's 14 Points and prizes but miss the philosophy underneath. He also gets into what changes once you start seeing your organization as one connected system. There are a few surprises along the way, like why his employees actually celebrated the day he got rid of performance appraisals. 0:00:01.9 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm here with featured guest Balaji Reddie, who is an educator and trainer in teaching of Dr. Deming and quality management generally. Now the topic for today is a deeper perspective of the teachings of Dr. Deming. Balaji, how are you?   0:00:29.6 Balaji Reddie: I am fine. It's wonderful to see you this morning. I have been looking forward to this for quite some time now.   0:00:37.0 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. In fact, we've been talking back and forth in the past and then we had a meeting recently to get going on this because you've got so much to share. And one of the things I just said is a deeper perspective on the teachings of Dr. Deming. Maybe you could just give a little background of yourself for those people that have never heard of your journey. Maybe tell us a little bit about your journey, the Deming journey, as well as what you're doing now.   0:01:02.2 Balaji Reddie: All right. So I am an electrical engineer by profession and my first job which I got was in a lamp, a bulb manufacturing company which made automotive lamps. And that's where I chose to be in the quality department because I was being shunted around in all the different departments and the owner of the company asked me, "Where would you like to be?" and I said, "Quality." I don't know, when I look back why I chose. I think it appealed to me as an engineer and also the fact that I wanted to be a manager. It combined engineering and something to do with managing people. I don't want to sound dramatic, but I don't think I chose quality, I think quality chose me. But what I did after that was conscious. I did a postgraduate diploma in quality management, the first structured course in the country, and then went on to a Master of Science in quality management here in India.   0:02:00.2 Balaji Reddie: So that's been my journey here as far as working. I worked a lot. I used to teach part-time, but I made this switch 20 years ago to be an educator primarily and decided to put all my focus into creating the next gen of managers. At the same time, during the bit of a free time that I have, I do consult, but that's not the core profession of mine. So, yes, I'm an educator and a trainer. You can say that. I teach quality management, anything to do with operations, supply chain, et cetera, but there's always been a Deming slant to it. Along with that, I've also liked to... Because I went into the works of Dr. Juran, I got a good chance to meet with him and be in touch with him. It was only the last six years of his life, but I think he had very little time to give me, but he gave me time. So I have a good perspective of both these gentlemen. And if you know quality, they're the pioneers.   0:03:01.5 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And I'm curious, when you first started out with the degrees and the, as you mentioned, getting a diploma and then a master's, was Deming front and center in there or was that a secondary thing? What was it like in the beginning?   0:03:19.6 Balaji Reddie: Oh, my entire focus was actually Deming. I needed to be qualified in that. I wanted to qualify myself in quality, that's what I meant here, because there was no... I was looking for a structured course on the subject. You had these training programs, certificate courses, but this one caught my attention when they said we have a diploma in quality. And part of the course was we had to, there was a project like a dissertation, and we had to show how we implemented this in our companies where we were working. And for those who were not working, they were provided companies where you go and actually implement these. So it was a win-win. So the company gained and you gained. That's how it was. That's what I liked about that course. Same with the masters. It was a complete two-year course. This was a year-and-a-half or three semesters. That was more elaborate, the masters. So, yeah.   0:04:18.0 Andrew Stotz: And what is the state of Deming and the teachings of Dr. Deming in India? We know that many companies in India have implemented the teachings of Deming over the years. But of course, there's a lot of people that just know nothing. I'm just curious, what is the state right now as far as the teachings of Dr. Deming?   0:04:40.3 Balaji Reddie: Oh, I'd like to... Just a slight correction there. We have the highest number of Deming Prize winners, but that does not necessarily mean that they're implementing the teachings of Dr. Deming. In fact, many of them after having got the prize... I worked in a company, we were suppliers to one of them. And when they came to do a vendor assessment to our factory, obviously there's a lot of buzz. Everyone in the company, they called me the Deming man. They used to call me that. And so when these guys came down and they were talking and when they gave their business card which had the Deming Prize logo, so they said, "Oh, we have... You know, Balaji is here and he's our Deming man." So who's he and what is this? And so they came and met me and they said that, "We got the Deming Prize." I said, "Excellent." But I said, "Just because you got the Deming Prize, I mean, have you worked on the Deming philosophy?" "Isn't this the same?" And I said, "No." And I, of course, joked with them, and they said, "So how do we learn?" And I said, "Pay me." [laughter] Anyway, yeah, then we got talking and they realized that there was such a big gap in what they were doing. For instance, when I spoke to them about performance appraisals and having quotas and things like that, they were like, "What?"   0:06:04.9 Andrew Stotz: Interesting. And when we talk about the Deming Prize, when I asked you that, we're talking about the Deming Prize which is offered by the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers through their Deming Prize Committee. This isn't something done through the Deming Institute.   0:06:12.3 Balaji Reddie: No.   0:06:19.7 Andrew Stotz: Yep. Okay. And do people study Deming there in India anymore or is it fading out or...   0:06:26.7 Balaji Reddie: Well, yeah, that's what I said, they do know. The good part is that because of the fact that the Deming Prize winners are there, at least they know about Dr. Deming. And then they're curious to know, "Oh, what did he teach?" Because again, they've been given that perspective that he taught, well, wrongly, PDCA, and he focused on the 14 points. And then when they read the 14 points and then they get... Because when you read it just without understanding, you can actually... It can put off certain people. You may get a little repulsed and say, "Oh, my God, what's he saying?" But then there are certain people who get intrigued and say, "Wait a minute. This is challenging. He's saying that we need not have quotas? Then how are you going to get work done?" And that's where the questioning begins. And there have been normally these trends where some companies where they called me over, I shall not name one of them, one of the students I was teaching in class and I was talking about the 14 points, and then she comes up to me and she says, "I've spoken about you to my father, and he's working in this company, and they're going for the Deming Prize. He wants to meet you." And then she brings him to the college the next morning and then we had a lovely discussion. And he said, "We've been discussing the 14 points." And I said, "You know what? You're putting the cart before the horse. You need to discuss profound knowledge first." So he said, "I'll put you in touch with my HR, the human resource." And then that lady got in touch with me, then we had a good chat and I explained to her and she understood very quickly. Incidentally, Andrew, that's something very amazing, when I speak about these things to the HR people, they take to it like a fish takes to water. They say, "You're right. What can we do about appraisals? Appraisals are wrong." But they also know they're shackled. They do not have the authority to break and come out of it. There have been some cases where they've been bold enough, but many of them... That's one of the things I've seen over these last 20 years that I've been teaching, that everybody principally agrees, but they also say that we're bound by it.   0:08:37.6 Andrew Stotz: That reminds me when I attended my first seminar when I was 24, and I was very intimidated by all the people in the room. I was just fresh out of university, working at Pepsi in Los Angeles. I flew into Washington, D.C., and so I sat right in the front row and I just decided I'm not gonna look at anybody behind me because they're all bigwig executives. But then when I heard Deming really show no mercy and really be tough to them, I was like, "Wow, wow, this is interesting." And he was getting to the... As a factory supervisor, which is what I was at Pepsi, I could just see he was getting to the heart of the matter. And so, yeah, a lot of things are very obvious to people in the factory, but then it's the leadership that is an issue. I'm curious when we think about... Let's imagine that someone listening to this has never heard of Dr. Deming and it's their first time, they stumbled upon this, they're hearing you speak. They're gonna ask the question, "Why does this matter? What benefit do I get from this?" How would you describe that to someon

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  2. Why Commissions Didn't Fix Our Sales Problem

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    Why Commissions Didn't Fix Our Sales Problem

    What if your sales problem isn't your people — but the system they're stuck in? Mike Carr spent years doing what everyone told him to do: commissions, quotas, performance plans. Every new hire came with the quiet assumption they'd be gone in a few months. He even optimized onboarding to make firing faster. Then he did the math: it was costing ~$75,000 every time. He called it "Burning the Porsche." His friend Travis Timmons — who'd been applying Deming's principles — kept nudging him to look at it differently. Mike's first reaction? "This is crazy talk." In this episode, they walk through what changed, what didn't work at first, and why the biggest shift wasn't the system — it was the psychology. If you've ever felt stuck trying to fix your salespeople, this will change how you think about it. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today we have an interesting discussion. I'm going to be continuing my discussion with Travis Timmons, who we've been talking about all kinds of things, including offsites, which I've found very, very valuable. I know the listeners have, too. But we're also joined by Michael Carr, who is a business owner who found the teachings of Dr. Deming about 10 years ago and has been trying to implement it ever since. Why don't we kick it off with you, Travis? Tell us a little bit about how you came across Michael and what your relationship's been like over these years.   0:00:43.5 Travis Timmons: Yeah, thanks, Andrew. Great to be here again. Yeah, Mike and I met, I'll say it's probably 14 years ago, something like that. 13, 14 years ago, a business organization he and I were both part of and sat around a table of other business owners working on problems together. And long story short, and part of the problem solving, got to know Mike a little better and had some individual conversations about how Dr. Deming and the Deming approach was having such a positive impact on my business. Might be of interest to some of the things he was working on in his. And encouraged him to attend the Deming two and a half day. But that's kind of how we met, working on business problems together, having some of the same frustrations that even though we're in different industries, the problems seem to look eerily similar across businesses. So, yeah, that's kind of how he and I met and encouraged him to maybe explore Deming and see if it'd have a positive impact on him like it did for us.   0:01:49.2 Andrew Stotz: We were talking before we turned on the microphone about the idea of how do we reach the young man or woman out there who's looking for answers. And we know Deming has a lot of those answers. So I'm really interested to learn more about you, Mike, about not only, of course, your Deming journey, but maybe tell us a little bit about your business and your experience so people can kind of put you in context, in particular where they are and thinking about where you are and where you were.   0:02:17.8 Mike Carr: Sure. Yeah. I came into business about 25 years ago and I did it kind of accidentally where while I was in grad school, I started a campus chapter of Habitat for Humanity and I had more volunteers than I could handle. So over a weekend, I wrote a small piece of software to let people kind of sign up online. This is before the days of SaaS and everything that we're used to today. And that actually took off so quickly that I was supporting it for free, I was giving it away for free to other organizations - nonprofits. And eventually my wife said, this is taking so much of your time, you either need to start charging for it or shut it down and spend some more time with the family. So I quit my full-time job at the time, put all my effort on what became the business, and quickly found myself running a business with no business background or training because my training was in electrical engineering. So I hired my first salesperson and not knowing sort of how traditional business works, I hired the person on salary, fixed salary, and sort of set up a system for her to sell within.   0:03:39.3 Mike Carr: And again, not knowing Deming, not having any business background. And so I kind of accidentally set up sales the way Deming would have recommended because that's just what I thought made sense. Then later on hired a director of sales who had a lot of success in sales, but traditional sales, and he seemed to know what he was talking about. So we completely switched our sales to more of a traditional sales approach based on his recommendation. And that's when problems really started. Because as we're aware on everyone on the call here, the commissions, quotas, and that kind of thing cause a lot of unintended consequences. So at the time that I met Travis in the peer group that we belong to, I was having a lot of issues with sales. I couldn't figure out how to get sales to work. We were hiring and firing people rapidly. And Travis mentioned Deming to me and the Deming two and a half day training which I attended. And I had become so steeped in traditional sales at that time that after the training I literally said, this is crazy talk, this Deming stuff.   0:04:55.4 Mike Carr: It doesn't align at all with traditional sales techniques. But I gave it a shot and over the next year or two we started implementing it. We started trying things. I kept learning about Deming and at some point I realized this is actually the way I was doing it in the beginning when things were actually kind of working back then. So it was funny how I had come full circle from where I had started.   0:05:23.0 Andrew Stotz: And plenty of people that are listening have commission-based salespeople, bonus incentives, all kinds of different things. And they're like, that's the way you do it and the problems that you face are just part of it. And they couldn't see any other way. And it's way too much risk in their mind to even experiment with another way. So what were the problems that you were facing when you talked about I was facing these problems from the way I was compensating my salespeople? I want to make sure that we connect with people who are like... I don't want someone to say, well, that's not me. I want someone to understand exactly the problems that you were facing and then so they can think, okay, yeah, I probably have that problem.   0:06:11.7 Mike Carr: Right. So it was a lot of... So I'll describe sort of the sequence that we would go through. We would hire someone who seemed really qualified. We would give them a day or two of training, we would give them a telephone and a computer, and we would say, "Okay, you've been trained, you have the equipment, go do some hunting and get some sales," and basically leave them alone to go and do that. Of course, they would sort of rapidly fail because they didn't have the support they needed. They didn't have a system to work within. And so we would start applying pressure, we would start messing with compensation and apply incentives, and then we eventually get to a PIP, a performance improvement plan, and then we would eventually let them go and then do all the offboarding and then start from square one. And we did that so many times that we actually started optimizing our process for rapid hiring and firing. At one point, I moved to these thin client PCs so that we didn't even have to send an entire PC to the person.   0:07:25.7 Mike Carr: We could just send the thin client and put their desktop up in the cloud so that when we had to fire them later, it was just a lot quicker to get all your equipment back. So we optimized for that rapid hiring and firing, and we were literally going into most hires with the assumption we're going to fire this person within a couple of months. And so obviously you can imagine the stress that creates for the person we hired, obviously, but also stress on the part of management because we're just constantly failing all the time. Not to mention the business isn't getting revenue and we're missing all the opportunity that we could be capturing. So one day I said to the management team, let's add up how much it costs us to go through this entire cycle beginning to end in terms of man-hours and salary and so forth and missed opportunity. And the number we arrived at was something like $75,000. 75,000 to $100,000 every time we go through the loop. And so to put this in context, I said to the team, this is as if we had gone and bought a Porsche and then just poured gasoline all over it and lit it on fire every time we go through the loop. So I started calling it Burning the Porsche. Let's just burn the Porsche again, guys. And so we got to call it Burning the Porsche. We were optimizing for rapid hire and fire, and obviously stress levels on all sides were just skyrocketing. So those were the problems that we were facing.   0:09:10.0 Andrew Stotz: And I can hear a skeptical person say, oh, you just didn't know about how to train. I know how to train my salespeople, and I put them through this intense training, then I apply all those incentives and it works. What do you say to that?   0:09:27.4 Mike Carr: So, yeah, we tried all of those things. So we gave them piles and piles of written materials, we made training videos, and of course we wanted to hold them accountable for those things. So we had quizzes at the end of each training section, and assuming they passed the quiz, which was five or 10 questions, written questions, we would check the box. And we would later, when they began to fail, we would point back at the checkboxes from the training and say, "Hey, you were trained on this. We checked the box. Why are you not doing the things that you were trained on and the box was checked?" So, yeah, we tried a lot of different varieties of training and different accountability techniques, and just noth

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    Fitness Matters: A Deming Success Story (Part 4)

    How do you run an offsite that actually changes performance — not just conversations? In this episode, Travis Timmons and Kelly Allan share with Andrew Stotz what happened during the Fitness Matters off-site. They discuss how a Deming-inspired approach helped their team tackle a critical business aim, align around system improvement, and turn employee engagement into measurable competitive advantage. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.5 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with Travis Timmons, who is the founder and owner of Fitness Matters, an Ohio based practice specializing in the integration of physical therapy and personalized wellness. For 13 years, he's built his business on Dr. Deming's teaching. His hope is simple. The more companies that bring joy to work through Deming's principles, the more likely his kids will one day work at one of those companies. And we also have a special guest, Kelly Allan, who is a long term practitioner of the teachings of Dr. Deming. And he's also been instrumental in bringing the teachings of Dr. Deming to Travis and Fitness Matters, and particularly to this offsite. So the topic for today is how a Deming style offsite can strengthen your company's competitive advantage. Travis, take it away.   0:01:01.4 Travis Timmons: Hey Andrew, thanks again for having us and super excited to share with Kelly and your audience how our offsite went a couple of weeks ago. The short answer, kind of the upfront, is it was amazing. We had fun, number one, which is always important, but engagement from the team was through the roof. For four and a half hours straight. We worked on the work together and had Kelly there to make sure we were appropriately following Dr. Deming's teachings. Had Kelly there to facilitate and a couple of fun things we did. One was the red bead experiment, which I'm sure we'll talk about as we go through the conversation here. The short answer is I know in the last podcast we talked about the preparation that Kelly worked with myself and our leadership team on in preparing for a Deming focused and led offsite. We did that and it was just amazing. What were your thoughts, Kelly?   0:02:06.4 Andrew Stotz: I'm curious, Kelly, as an outsider helping them, observing, what are your observations of how it went?   0:02:14.2 Kelly Allan: I think there was just incredible energy and interest in figuring out some of the challenges ahead for the company. People came in well prepared and it showed. The interactions in the breakout groups, interactions in the full groups. Often when you're in a full group of 60, 70 people, folks are often, especially new folks, and the company's been growing and adding new people, new folks are often somewhat hesitant to speak up. But the culture of the people in that room, the culture of the organization is bring it on, let's have a conversation, let's hear what people have to say. Let's share theories, let's get down and debate and wrestle with some of these things that are not easy. There's no low hanging fruit here. It's complex stuff in a complex and highly competitive industry.   0:03:28.9 Travis Timmons: Some of the feedback we received, I think I shared last time, Andrew. As Kelly said, we've hired several new team members and they've all shared with me just a breath of fresh air from where they came from before. The power of this offsite with it being focused on some of the core teachings of Dr. Deming allowed them to see how is this different? They know they like it, they know the culture is different. They know they can provide care the way they want to. They know they can have a voice, have an impact on the system. But they didn't really know why they just liked it. Having a Deming focused offsite to explain a little bit, you can't fully explain Dr. Deming in four and a half hours, but we covered quite a bit. Make the system visible, operational definitions. What are a couple other ones with the red bead, Kelly? We did some tampering.   0:04:28.8 Kelly Allan: Making sure that we're not being confused by visible numbers alone. That what's important is how we work on the system so that we're not doing special efforts all the time to get great results. It's built into how we do things.   0:04:43.8 Travis Timmons: To Kelly's point, part of why our team, for four and a half hours we had over 50 people all in, sharing thoughts without hesitation because one of the things we talk about in the very beginning of the meeting, one of Dr. Deming's core philosophies, if that's the right way to put it, Kelly, correct me if I'm off base here, but 96% of issues within an organization are system issues, not people issues. When you put that out there, we're here to talk about the system and improve it and make it visible. We're talking about problems with systems and processes, not people. Then the gloves are off and let's dive in and we're gonna say whatever's on our mind and there's no drama, there's no feeling of any backstabbing or throwing under the bus. We just get to work on making the system work better for everybody. That's where it's fun and fast.   0:05:41.9 Andrew Stotz: What I'm hearing is that Dr. Deming, my favorite quote is "people are entitled to joy in work." And part of the key to joy in work is contributing. People want to contribute in life. I love that word because I think everybody wants to feel like they're contributing to a mission, to an aim, to a goal, to a team. And one of the biggest problems we have these days is siloing off people and getting them focused on this little area and missing the whole bigger picture. And so to some extent, you've proven through what you've done that people really do want to contribute. Throughout this discussion, what we're gonna be talking about is this concept of Deming style offsite. And I'm gonna push back at times to try to make sure that we're clear on what's a Deming style offsite. Because it's not to say that Dr. Deming said this is how you do an offsite. But what we're talking about is your interpretations of how do we apply this thinking to this particular meeting style and offsite and ensure that we're true to that.   0:06:56.6 Andrew Stotz: One of the first questions I would discuss is just the idea that maybe you just had a really open, caring environment. And so is that Deming or was that just that? Or maybe you did a lot of prep. You guys have done a tremendous amount of prep. That's what I was impressed about in our prior discussions. Maybe you prepped, maybe you focused on the one thing. Those types of things is what could go through people's minds. Why is it that you're calling this a Deming styled offsite?   0:07:34.9 Kelly Allan: Well, I think in part it starts with Deming's teachings and continued Deming's teachings. I think it might be useful to start with the aim, to have Travis talk about the time that he spent researching and thinking and what's going on in the industry. And even though we can talk later about their industry leading statistics and data and recognition etc, it's off the charts. It starts with the aim. And Dr. Deming said let's be focused on the aim. And so there are a couple, Travis, you wanna just talk about the content aim and then we can talk about even a more cultural Deming cultural aim.   0:08:21.1 Travis Timmons: That was one of my early learnings years ago, Andrew, was the difference of an aim versus a goal. And so from the perspective of this offsite through the Dr. Deming lens, our aim as an organization is to maintain one to one care because we believe that results in optimal outcomes. And it's very rare in our industry to have one to one care. Part of how we do that is we have to be industry leading in everything we do. And the thing that we are industry leading in, but I feel it was the one thing that we could improve upon was our arrival rate. Patients get better if they show up, team members are happy, they don't want holes on their schedules. Referring physicians are happy. Everybody wins. So that aim of a higher arrival rate was our aim of this offsite and conversation.   0:09:17.6 Andrew Stotz: Can you back up just for a second and define arrival rate for those that didn't listen to prior discussions on it?   0:09:23.9 Travis Timmons: Sure. Arrival rate is a visit we have on the calendar. Do they show up or do they cancel? And part of what we worked on and a little bit of an aside here is operational definition of what's a cancellation on our schedule to make sure we're measuring what we want to measure. A funny aside, competitors, we hired several new team members came from other organizations and they tout an arrival rate that is high, like 92% arrival rate. Right.   0:09:55.9 Travis Timmons: And I asked them in the meeting and Kelly will remember this, I said, I know your institutions claim a 90 plus percent arrival rate. Did you have a 92% arrival rate? And they said, absolutely not. But they had people on their team, for example, the front desk might have been bonused based on arrival rate. So how they would take visits off of the calendar would not negatively impact arrival rate. So we talked a lot about operational definition and our aim is to study what we want to study, not to tamper or. Kelly, you share your favorite saying. There's only three ways to get better numbers, and those are   0:10:39.6 Kelly Allan: Manipulate the numbers which you were referring to from another company. Manipulate the system that gives you the numbers. So that also kind of fits with, well, we're not gonna call that a late arrival or a late cancel or a non arrival. We're gonna call that something else so we can manipulate the numbers. And then the third way, which was Deming's way, which is how do we figure out how to improve the system so that late arrivals go down. So that they're a natural part

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    The Courage to Not React

    What do you do when a new data point drops—and all eyes turn to you? In this episode, John Dues and Andrew Stotz explore the leadership discipline required when performance data changes. Instead of reacting to a single data point, they unpack how Deming thinking (understanding variation, avoiding tampering, and pausing to interpret patterns) can protect trust, stability, and improvement. A practical conversation for leaders who want wisdom—not speed—to guide their decisions. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. The topic for today is when the numbers change and everyone looks at you. John, take it away.   0:00:28.4 John Dues: Yeah, it's good to be back, Andrew. I think this is sort of an interesting topic. Many of us that have been in leadership roles have been in this position where the numbers change, whatever they may be. For me, they're dips in attendance, they're assessment results changing, something like that, a subgroup's results changes from the previous year. Sometimes the changes are small, sometimes they're big. But I'm thinking about times when they're just large enough to draw attention in a meeting. And it's not even really so much the size of the change that's important, it's what happens next.   0:01:12.9 John Dues: So you can kind of put yourself in one of these meetings where you're looking at data and maybe you didn't even expect it, but people kind of notice. Then someone asks what went wrong? And then the next thing that comes is someone suggests some type of fix or solution, and then this pressure starts to build. Especially if they're all sort of looking at you, the silence can feel irresponsible. And so what do we do? We react in some way. We call another... For explanations, maybe from others. We adjust a plan that's already in place. We launch a new initiative or tighten expectations on people, whatever it may be. None of it's out of malice. It's done out of care, most typically, or at least in the settings I've observed this sort of phenomenon.   0:02:13.1 Andrew Stotz: Don't just stand there, do something.   0:02:15.2 John Dues: Don't just stand there, do something. But the thing is, very often it just makes things worse. Right?   0:02:21.0 Andrew Stotz: Don't just do something. Stand there.   0:02:23.8 John Dues: Right, right. The opposite. But even if you know that, it's very, very difficult in the moment to...   0:02:32.5 Andrew Stotz: The pressures.   0:02:33.6 John Dues: Yeah.   0:02:34.9 Andrew Stotz: Well, I have a little... Little thing happened last night when a friend of mine came to see my mom and me, and we went out for there's a restaurant nearby, so we got the walker and got mom going. And her natural inclination was to help mom in getting up and that type of thing. And I was explaining to her the difference between what I call a caregiver and a caretaker. And I was saying that most people are caretakers where they're just taking care and they want to just help. And she's like, "It's irresistible. I mean, in my bones, I want to help." And I said, "It's very hard to see that sometimes the best help is to let her struggle and use her legs to get up, not to help her on that." And that was like a revelation for her last night, it just made me think about that.   0:03:33.8 John Dues: No, that's actually a perfect analogy because her health is sort of a high stakes environment. Just like schools are high stakes environments or many of the businesses that people run that listen to this podcast have high stakes. In our cases, it's students and families matter, outcomes matter. There's a lot of different stakeholders that are interested in what's going on in schools. And when those numbers do change, it can feel like neglect if you don't do anything. We're expected to notice. We're expected to... Good leaders are supposed to respond. They're supposed to act decisively, right?   0:04:12.0 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, because there's another aspect to it too. Let's just say that you have a boss that understands it and you're like, "Yeah, it's just noise. It's not signal." But how many times can you say that? Right?   0:04:27.8 John Dues: Yeah, that's right.   0:04:28.5 Andrew Stotz: That's another kind of pressure in that situation.   0:04:31.6 John Dues: Yeah, that's like the second-in-command type person, right? So they have their own pressure. And what you can see happening, this like visible action is sort of like evidence of competence because you can see it. And so the reaction becomes the default. So just like in this example you're giving with your mom, that action to help is very hard to resist. Even though by doing so, like you were saying, she doesn't get the physical exercise and actually makes things worse in the long term for your mom's health.   0:05:10.4 Andrew Stotz: "Boss, why did Kevin get a promotion and not me?" "Well, Kevin's a man of action."   0:05:14.8 John Dues: Man of action, right. Exactly. Exactly. And there's all these risks for a leader that doesn't react right away. Are they disengaged? If they're asking questions instead of acting right away, are they just uncertain? They lack certainty? Are you ignoring the data if you are pausing or waiting? Again, under these conditions, which I think are prevalent just about everywhere that I've been, at least, reacting quickly feels like the safest move. But I think the conflation is speed and wisdom. But speed is not, definitely not the same thing as wisdom, right?   0:06:02.1 John Dues: In all of our organizations, the data fluctuates naturally over time. No different in schools, like we've talked about. Attendance rises and falls, assessment results bounce up and down, behavior incidents they spike and they dip. And it's not necessarily a sign that something's broken. It's often just how systems typically behave, the systems that we're paying attention to. I think the main mistake leaders typically make in that moment when they see that movement is that they think that automatically means something changed. And so you get these concerns if it's a bad move in the data. If it's a short-term increase, maybe we trigger some type of celebration. So this works both ways, actually. But the main point is that one data point becomes a story. It becomes the story of what's... We try to attach an explanation to this dip or this increase that's actually not grounded in any kind of reality. We would say they're just reacting to noise, kind of like what you just said. And the problem, though, is that there's a number of then very predictable things that happen. First, educators, and I felt this as a teacher. I taught in Atlanta Public Schools, a big district that was trying lots of new things in the early 2000s. You feel this whiplash. So priority shifts, guidance changes. Yesterday's focus is replaced by today's concern.   0:07:44.5 John Dues: And what happens in a setting like that, that I found, is that people start explaining instead of learning. Especially when there's a strong accountability system like there is in education systems, results are questioned immediately, often. And so the safest response at almost all levels of the organization is just to justify what's already happened, not to explore what might be improved. Very, very, very difficult. And that then leads to trust eroding. And over time, what I've seen is that educators learn that any fluctuation brings scrutiny. They become cautious, defensive, quiet. And obviously none of that improves outcomes. And again, just like in the example with your mom, it actually makes things harder to improve in the long term. So this overreacting to this routine variation then often increases variation, and so the system actually becomes noisier and not more capable. You get this vicious cycle. What's that?   0:09:00.5 Andrew Stotz: Tampering.   0:09:01.8 John Dues: Yeah, tampering. Exactly. That's what Deming would call it, tampering. When you intervene in a stable system.   0:09:07.3 Andrew Stotz: It's interesting. The one data point becomes a story is a great, great line. In the world of finance, everybody's trying to get the next wave. As a financial analyst, you're trying to think, okay. And all we do constantly is look at the next data point and say, "Does this confirm or not my view that gold's going to crash now, or gold's going to rise, or US stocks are going to X, or the dollar is going to... " And most of the time, we're just making one data point become a story, and then the next data point comes out and it's like, "Okay, so there's a different story here." And then...   0:09:51.3 John Dues: Yeah. That explanation there it's sort of... The key idea is reaction. It's literally seductive. It is seductive because it feels productive.   0:10:04.3 Andrew Stotz: In my finance work, when I help people with their money, what I do introduce what I've learned from Dr. Deming to say it really helps me separate the signal from the noise in the stock market, and therefore, I will never react. And I even set parameters where I rebalance my portfolio every three months. So when they go, "What are you going to do about such and such?" it's like, "Everything's set. I'm going to wait until the results are in, and I'm going to reevaluate on a framework, on a systematic way," which just helps me from getting whipsawed this way or whiplash this way or that way. And it's proven to be not only great for helping people feel like I have a deeper understanding and follow what I'm doing, but it also improves performance.   0:11:07.7 John Dues: Yeah. And you know, I'm definitely no financial expert by any means, but it makes me

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  5. ٢ فبراير

    Fitness Matters: A Deming Success Story (Part 3)

    How do you design a team off-site that actually improves your organization? In this episode, Travis Timmons breaks down the mechanics of a Deming-styled off-site team meeting—from starting months early and setting a clear aim to using pre-work, fishbone diagrams, and PDSAs to drive real change. If you want a real-world example of how Deming leaders create focus, collaboration, and joy in work, this conversation is a practical place to start. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussions with Travis Timmons, who is the founder and owner of Fitness Matters, an Ohio-based practice specializing in the integration of physical therapy and personalized wellness. For 13 years, he's built his business on Dr. Deming's teachings. His hope is simple; the more companies that bring joy to work through Deming's principles, the more likely his kids will one day work at one of those darn companies. Travis, how are you doing?   0:00:35.2 Travis Timmons: Hey, Andrew. Doing well, how are you?   0:00:37.1 Andrew Stotz: I'm really excited. We were just talking about the structure of today's discussion, and the topic for today is the mechanics of a Deming-styled offsite, which I... In today's session, we're going to be talking about the importance of starting early, setting an aim, figuring out and developing an agenda. Also homework, huh?   0:01:05.1 Travis Timmons: Right.   0:01:05.4 Andrew Stotz: Pre-work for attendees. I thought that's interesting as we were going through it. And then you talk about your activities, your outcomes and all of that. So why don't you get into it and walk us through the mechanics of a Deming-styled offsite. And by the way, one last thing. When we say Deming-styled, well, you're certainly getting a lot of support from a true Deming advocate, Kelly Allen, and your understanding of the teachings of Dr. Deming. And so you're doing your best to apply those things in this. Is it a perfect Deming offsite? Well, that's why we say Deming-styled offsite. Maybe the listener or the viewer would add in or subtract some things, but at least we've got the general structures. So why don't you take it away, Travis?   0:01:47.3 Travis Timmons: Yeah, no, happy to, Andrew. So yeah, we have our team offsite. It'll actually be 10 days from now. So from a big picture standpoint, one of the things I've learned is systems, process, organization, and none of that happens quickly. So every time we do an annual team offsite, it's about a three-month work-ahead process for myself and the leadership team. So we start a good three months before the meeting date just to start percolating on what do we need to talk about at this meeting? What's the aim? What do we want the outcome to be? And that doesn't happen with a week of preparation. So we've had to spend some time looking at our KPIs, where do we have an opportunity to have a positive impact on our system? So we have to study our current system, see where there might be opportunities for improvement, understand how do we want the team to engage with that. And for this year's offsite, our big aim... We have two aims for the offsite. One is to make the system visible. Everybody on the team. I've had some learnings through some newer leaders on our team that have been through the DemingNEXT and they've been on our team for a few years.   0:03:04.1 Travis Timmons: But they until going through the DemingNEXT, they didn't fully understand what system view meant. And that kind of hit me over the head like a ton of bricks. It's like, well, maybe that would be a good thing to spend part of our offsite making sure the entire team can visualize and see our organization as a system. And then the second aim from a mechanics, from a KPI standpoint, if you will, is we want to improve arrival rate for our visits. So basically, how many scheduled appointments show up is what we call arrival rate. To have a better impact on patient outcomes, joy in work for our team members, joy in the referral sources that send to us. So yeah, it was about a three-month process.   0:03:49.3 Andrew Stotz: And if I... Just curious, sometimes when I've done offsites or I've attended offsites, it's more general. Here you have a very specific thing, improve arrival rates. Why is it so specific and how do you come to that decision that this isn't going to be just an open discussion about things in our company?   0:04:14.4 Travis Timmons: Yeah. That's a great question. Some years they are a little more general. Like last year we spent quite a bit of time setting a new round of BHAGs, Big Hairy Audacious Goals. This year, looking at KPIs, looking at where the opportunities were to improve, where there were the most breakdowns and frustrations happening in our system that we were hearing consistently across our team. It's like, what's the one thing we can have an impact on that will, if we improve that, everything else will get better. And that was arrival rate. So then we started looking at, all right, how do we dissect that? How do we make it visible to the team so the entire team can work on it together? So that's how we came to that. And it's like, all right, this is a consistent issue. So if you do the control chart, it's like I can almost set my watch to what's arrival rate going to be every week. And until we change something in our system, that's going to be what's going to continue to happen and we need to have an impact on that this year. So that's how we came down to it. It's the one thing we can do that'll have the most impact positively across the entire organization.   0:05:23.1 Andrew Stotz: I often talk about a big company in Thailand that was a Deming-focused company for many, many years, and then a new CEO came in and he made it a different focus company. And the company struggled for years. Whether it's from that or not is a secondary item. But two weeks ago I was giving a lecture and a guy from that company, who is an older guy, was at the lecture. And afterwards we were talking and I said, "What's the difference between the prior guy and the new guy?" He said, "The prior guy set the direction and we all knew it. The new guy kind of has us set it or we go in a lot of different directions. It's not as clear." And so what I was thinking when you were talking about improve arrival rates, I was thinking, yeah, that's leadership. You've identified what you believe is the most critical element at this stage of the business right now, and there's a lot of knock-on effects of fixing that. Whereas if you went into that room and you say, "What's the biggest problem we have right now?"   0:06:35.6 Travis Timmons: Right.   0:06:36.3 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, you're going to get a long list, but as a leader you have to set the direction.   0:06:41.1 Travis Timmons: Yeah. Yeah, and with the leadership team as well. And yeah, where do we... The KPIs and the system, if you study it and look at the outputs through the Deming lenses, it becomes... It's not easy. You got to spend the work and have the tools in place and the discipline to track it all consistently so that you know what your true arrival rate is. I can get in... It's a whole probably different conversation, but tampering and all that kind of stuff. So we know what our data is because of how we've made very clear definitions on our arrival rate and how we don't tamper to get better numbers. But yeah, it's exciting. The team, as crazy as this might sound, we've done these for many years now, over a decade, and the team looks forward to them. And part of that is because we spend the time. I take this very seriously. If I'm going to ask people to come to a meeting for five hours, it better be good. And we better bring... We better have something we can work on as a team to come out of it. And if we don't, that's nobody's fault but mine. So that ownership of the system I take very seriously.   0:07:58.1 Andrew Stotz: A great song, by the way, by Led Zeppelin, Nobody's Fault But Mine. But I would also say that's why I think it's fascinating to continue to go through the structure that you've got, because I think it can guide all of us. So we've learned about starting three months early. I was also thinking about my Crock-Pot. I like to cook slow-cooking food and I put all these different tastes of an onion and a piece of meat, which doesn't really have taste in some ways. And I put them all in a pot and it's eight hours. And if I interrupt it at one hour, there's just, there's not much value there. It needs time to extract the tastes and also bring those tastes into each other until you end up at the end of eight hours. Like, whoa, that's amazing. So...   0:08:51.4 Travis Timmons: Right. Right. Yeah, as you're pointing to, that's kind of how the agenda evolves. So we have an aim of system visibility and arrival rate. Well, how do we put an agenda around that together? So myself, the leadership team, Kelly, we've been working back and forth quite a bit, several iterations of that. So that's part of why you need that three months. You work on it. That sounds great in your head. You put it on some PowerPoint slides and then you share it with folks and they're like, "I don't know really what you're trying to say there, Travis." So there's...   0:09:25.0 Andrew Stotz: It seems like an onion and a carrot.   0:09:27.0 Travis Timmons: Right. Right.   0:09:27.3 Andrew Stotz: But I don't get the taste of it.   0:09:29.6 Travis Timmons: Yeah, so it's just working through those iterations. So miniature, little PDSAs, if you will, of the agenda. But yeah, once we get it to a point where we feel like, okay, we know what we want to work on, then the next big thing becomes how do we get the team involved ahead of the meeting? Because if you... I found very clearly over the years, if the t

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  6. ٢٦ يناير

    Where is Quality Really Made? An Insider's View of Deming's World

    In this episode, Bill Scherkenbach, one of W. Edwards Deming's closest protégés, and host Andrew Stotz discuss why leadership decisions shape outcomes far more than frontline effort. Bill draws on decades of firsthand experience with Deming and with businesses across industries. Through vivid stories and practical insights, the conversation challenges leaders and learners alike to rethink responsibility, decision-making, and what it truly takes to build lasting quality. Bill's powerpoint is available here. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussions with Bill Scherkenbach, a dedicated protégé of Dr. Deming since 1972. Bill met with Dr. Deming more than a thousand times and later led statistical methods and process improvement at Ford and GM at Dr. Deming's recommendation. He authored the Deming Route to Quality and Productivity at Deming's behest and at 79, still champions his mentor's message: Learn, have fun, and make a difference. The discussion for today is, I think we're going to get an answer to this question. And the question is: Where is quality made? Bill, take it away.   0:00:44.9 Bill Scherkenbach: Where is quality made? I can hear the mellifluous doctor saying that. And the answer is: In the boardroom, not on the factory floor. And over and over again, he would say that it's the quality of the decisions that the management make that can far outweigh anything that happens on the shop floor. And when he would speak about that, he would first of all, because he was talking to the auto industry, he would talk about who's making carburetors anymore. "Nobody's making carburetors because it's all fuel injectors," he would say. And anyone who has been following this, another classic one is: Do you ever hear of a bank that failed? Do you think that failed because of mistakes in tellers' windows or calculations of interest? Heck no. But there are a whole bunch of other examples that are even more current, if you will. I mean, although this isn't that current, but Blockbuster had fantastic movies, a whole array of them, the highest quality resolutions, and they completely missed the transition to streaming. And Netflix and others took it completely away from them because of mistakes made in the boardroom. You got more recently Bed Bath & Beyond having a great product, a great inventory.   0:02:51.4 Bill Scherkenbach: But management took their eyes off of it and looked at, they were concerned about stock buybacks and completely lost the picture of what was happening. It was perfect. It was a great product, but it was a management decision. WeWork, another company supplying office places. It was great in COVID and in other areas, but through financial mismanagement, they also ended up going bust. And so there are, I mean, these are examples of failures, but as Dr. Deming also said, don't confuse success with success. If you think you're making good decisions, you got to ask yourself how much better could it have been if you tried something else. So, quality is made in the boardroom, not on the factory floor.   0:04:07.9 Andrew Stotz: I had an interesting encounter this week and I was teaching a class, and there was a guy that came up and talked to me about his company. His company was a Deming Prize from Japan winner. And that was maybe 20, 25 years ago. They won their first Deming Prize, and then subsidiaries within the company won it. So the actual overall company had won something like nine or 10 Deming Prizes over a couple decades. And the president became...   0:04:43.5 Bill Scherkenbach: What business are they in?   0:04:45.5 Andrew Stotz: Well, they're in...   0:04:47.0 Bill Scherkenbach: Of winning prizes?   0:04:48.7 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, I mean, they definitely, the CEO got the distinguished individual prize because he was so dedicated to the teachings of Dr. Deming. And he really, really expanded the business well, the business did well. A new CEO took over 15 years ago, 10 years ago, and took it in another direction. And right now the company is suffering losses and many other problems that they're facing. And I asked the guy without talking about Deming, I just asked him what was the difference between the prior CEO and the current one or the current regimes that have come in. And he said that the prior CEO, it was so clear what the direction was. Like, he set the direction and we all knew what we were doing. And I just thought now as you talk about, the quality is made at the boardroom, it just made me really think back to that conversation and that was what he noticed more than anything. Yeah well, we were really serious about keeping the factory clean or we used statistics or run charts, that was just what he said, I thought that was pretty interesting.   0:06:06.7 Bill Scherkenbach: Absolutely. And that reminds me of another comment that Dr. Deming was vehement about, and that was was the management turnover. Turnovers in boardrooms every 18 months or so, except maybe in family businesses. But that's based on the quality of decisions made in the boardroom. How fast do you want to turn over the CEOs and that C-suite? So it's going to go back to the quality is made in the boardroom.   0:06:50.0 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, and I think maybe it's a good chance for me to share the slide that you have. And let's maybe look at that graphic. Does that makes sense now?   0:07:00.9 Bill Scherkenbach: Sure, for sure.   0:07:02.2 Andrew Stotz: Let's do that. Let's do that. Hold on. All right.   0:07:15.8 Bill Scherkenbach: Okay, okay, okay. You can see on the top left, we'll start the story. I've got to give you a background. This was generated based on my series of inputs and prompts, but this was generated by Notebook LM and based on the information I put in, this is what they came up with.   0:07:48.6 Andrew Stotz: Interesting.   0:07:50.1 Bill Scherkenbach: Based on various information, which I think did a fairly decent job. In any event, we're going to talk about all of these areas, except maybe the one where it says principles for active leadership, because that was the subject of a couple of our vlogs a while ago, and that is the three foundational obligations. And so the thing is that quality, even though Dr. Deming said it was made in the boardroom, one of the problems is that management did not know what questions to ask, and they would go, and Dr. Deming railed against MBWA, management by walking around, primarily because management hadn't made the transition to really take on board what Dr. Deming was talking about in profound knowledge. And that is, as you've mentioned, setting that vision, continually improving around it, and pretty much absolutely essential was to reduce fear within the organization.   0:09:25.9 Bill Scherkenbach: And so management by walking around without profound knowledge, which we've covered in previous talks, only gets you dog and pony shows. And with the fear in the organization, you're going to be carefully guided throughout a wonderful story. I mentioned I was in Disney with some of my granddaughters over the holidays, and they tell a wonderful story, but you don't ever see what's behind the scenery. And management never gets the chance because they really haven't had the opportunity to attain profound knowledge. So that's one of the things. I want to back up a little bit because Dr. Deming would... When Dr. Deming said quality is made at the top, he only agreed to help companies where the top management invited him, he wasn't out there marketing. If they invited him to come in, he would first meet with them and they had to convince him they were serious about participating, if not leading their improvement. And given that, that litmus test, he then agreed to work with them. Very few companies did he agree to on that. And again as we said, the quality of the decisions and questions and passion that determine the successfulness of the company. And so.   0:11:40.0 Andrew Stotz: It made me think about that letter you shared that he was saying about that there was, I think it was within the government and government department that just wasn't ready for change and so he wasn't going to work with it. I'm just curious, like what do you think was his... How did he make that judgment?   0:12:00.0 Bill Scherkenbach: Well, it wasn't high enough. And again, I don't know how high you'd have to go in there. But quite honestly, what we spoke about privately was in politics and in the federal government, at least in the US, things change every four years. And so you have management turnover. And so what one manager, as you described, one CEO is in there and another one comes in and wants to do it their way, they're singing Frank Sinatra's My Way. But that's life….   0:12:49.3 Andrew Stotz: Another great song.   0:12:50.7 Bill Scherkenbach: Another, yes.   0:12:52.1 Andrew Stotz: And it's not like he was an amateur with the government.   0:12:57.5 Bill Scherkenbach: No.   0:13:00.3 Andrew Stotz: He had a lot of experience from a young age, really working closely with the government. Do you think that he saw there was some areas that were worth working or did he just kind of say it's just not worth the effort there or what was his conclusions as he got older?   0:13:16.9 Bill Scherkenbach: Well, as he got older, it might, it was the turnover in management. When he worked for Agriculture, although agriculture is political, and he worked for Census Bureau back when he worked there, it wasn't that political, it's very political now. But there was more a chance for constancy and more of a, their aim was to do the best survey or census that they could do. And so the focus was on setting up systems that would deliver that. But that's what his work with the government was prior to wh

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  7. ١٩ يناير

    Fitness Matters: A Deming Success Story (Part 2)

    What happens when an entire company learns to see its work as a system? In this episode, Travis Timmons reveals how his team uses Deming-inspired pre-work, collaboration, and the Red Bead Experiment to make their offsite energizing and impactful. It's a practical, engaging look at how clarity and shared purpose can transform improvement efforts and build a happy workplace. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with Travis Timmons, who is the founder and owner of Fitness Matters, an Ohio-based practice specializing in the integration of physical therapy and personalized wellness. For 13 years he's built his business on Dr. Deming's teachings. His hope is simple. The more companies that bring joy to work through Deming's principles, the more likely his kids will one day work at one. The topic for today is bringing systems thinking to your next team off-site. Travis, take it away.   0:00:41.5 Travis Timmons: Hey Andrew, great to be with you again. And, yeah, looking forward to sharing a little bit about how we're preparing for our next annual team meeting. And focus for this meeting is going to be, well, a little back story, we had three of our newer leadership members attend some Deming learning, some Deming education. And the biggest comeback, the biggest aha moment they had was they now better understood what I meant by the system view and systems thinking, which got me thinking, boy, it would be great if more of our team fully understood what the system meant, how to visualize it, and then how that further dives into the Deming System of Profound Knowledge. So that's what we've been working on. Our offsite is January 30th, so about a month away. We're about six weeks into preparation for that, kind of going back and forth on what needs to be in there. And the biggest thing, the first exercise, they're going to have homework to do coming into the meeting. We're going to have them kind of diagram what they think the system is. What is the Fitness Matters system? And we're going to prime them a little bit.   0:01:51.7 Travis Timmons: We're going to be doing it via a fishbone chart is the method we've decided to do that with. So, yeah, very excited about that. And it's a great way to get the team working on the work together and making sure they have an appreciation, as Dr. Deming would say, an appreciation for the system. And if you don't know what the system means, it's hard to appreciate it. So, trying to make more team members understand that.   0:02:14.7 Andrew Stotz: And what you're describing, I think is like pre-work that you're asking them to do?   0:02:21.1 Travis Timmons: Yes, yeah. So we'll have we've been spending the last few weeks on making sure we get the right questions in there because we want them to come in prepared but not feel like it's overwhelming or not feel like it's too heavy, if you will. But we want them to do the work so that they can come in and we can dive deeper once we get into some of the teachings and making the visible system of what everything looks like for them. So, that's kind of what we're working on.   0:02:49.1 Andrew Stotz: Did you guide them on, "Here's a fishbone chart, here's how to use it," and then, "Here's the system"? Or do you want them to just understand the fishbone chart and how to use it, and then, "Okay, don't talk to anybody else, you come up with what your vision of the system is"?   0:03:05.0 Travis Timmons: Yeah, so we have a total of seven locations. So what we are going to put in the homework is a one-page definition on what a fishbone is, how to use it and maybe pre-fill in a few of the primary bones, if you will.   0:03:20.3 Andrew Stotz: Yep.   0:03:20.8 Travis Timmons: Just to give them a primer. But we do hope they work together around the lunch tables and the break rooms, and the local leadership will be there to kind of guide them. Because that's where a lot of the collaboration and culture starts to happen and continues to build. So yeah, there'll be some learning about what is a fishbone, how to use it, because several have probably not used one before. And then we'll prime it a little bit, but then we want them to work on it, kind of kind of work, struggle a little bit to see, like, "All right, what's been invisible to me that happens behind the scenes, and it just happens." And make sure that then we can kind of dive deeper into when we say somebody has a good visit at Fitness Matters, how does that happen? And it's everything from first contact to insurance, to in the clinics, to how they pay their bill. So, just making sure that somebody understands what piece of the puzzle they play and then how it all works together. So we don't have silos, is one of the things we try to avoid, having silos within the organization.   0:04:25.8 Andrew Stotz: So, just so that the listener and viewer can implement what they're learning from you just to be clear. So, you're giving them the fishbone chart, teaching them about it, maybe filling in some of the main bones, as you said. And then just to be clear, you talked about them discussing things. Are you saying when you're working on your fishbone, talk to others about it and try to figure that out together?   0:04:51.7 Travis Timmons: Yeah.   0:04:52.5 Andrew Stotz: Okay.   0:04:52.6 Travis Timmons: Yeah, we want them collaborating and there's going to be people who wear different hats in our company. Some are physical therapists, some are Pilates instructors, some are client care coordinators, some are billing managers. So it'll be interesting to see what they bring to the table. And part of it is we don't want them to struggle. We want to kind of prime the pump, but we also want them to see the big picture. So that's why we're doing the fishbone methodology is so we can see it when we get to the actual team meeting. And then we're going to work with them on, then you can do fishbones of individual processes or individual pieces of the system.   0:05:33.1 Andrew Stotz: And, I mean, the reason why I'm asking this is because something like a system, for some people, they understand it, but for other people, they'll just get lost. And then what they bring to the meeting is not really some deep thinking on the topic, but, "Here's my best idea of what you meant."   0:05:50.1 Travis Timmons: Right. Right. Yeah, and we assume like some people may not have the opportunity based on how their schedule works to do much interaction and collaboration, others will have more. It'll be interesting to see what each location comes up with. Our hope is it's similar because we do spend time with the onboarding process talking about Dr. Deming, but we don't currently have a full fishbone diagram in our onboarding manual, for example. And that might change after this offsite. We might add that. You might find that that's a very good idea.   0:06:23.8 Andrew Stotz: Okay, so you got them working on their pre-work, which is the systems thinking, lay out your system in a fishbone chart. What's next?   0:06:35.0 Travis Timmons: So they'll have about two and a half weeks to work on that, heading up to the team offsite. And then we have a four and a half hour agenda for the team offsite. And first part of the phase is we're going to have them break out into groups, six groups. We have a total of 50 people there. So, six tables, and we're going to have each of them with posty notes. We're going to have the fishbone, like the bones there, and they're going to use posty notes to kind of fill in the system. That'll kind of be activity one. We're going to talk about what their learnings were from the homework, what were their aha moments or things they hadn't considered or complexities they didn't realize existed. Talk about that for about a half hour, 45 minutes. And then we're going to take a little break and come back and Kelly Allen's going to be there. He's going to walk our entire team through the red bead experiment, which is one of my favorite in-person Deming exercises. So we're going to go through the Red Bead experiment. And if people don't, that's probably too long of a conversation to explain what that is on this conversation, but opportunity there then to show where there are kind of defects in the system, if you will. So the big thing we're working on for this team offsite beyond system view is how do we improve arrival rate? So what arrival rate is in our industry is how many of our scheduled visits, whether it be for personal training, Pilates, physical therapy, how many of the scheduled visits show up? So a lot that goes into why do they show up? Are they scheduled appropriately? Do they understand their billing? Do they have a good experience? Is it easy to do the scheduling? So that's what's going to be our example of a red bead in the Red Bead experiment. So yeah, going to spend about an hour on the Red Bead experiment. And then myself and our director of operations are then going to, at the end of the red bead, when Kelly debriefs what we just saw happen and people feel the angst of people that, you know, put the paddle in and keep pulling out red beads, even though they were offered bonuses and they just can't quite do it. Talk about how that correlates to our system.   0:08:55.9 Travis Timmons: What are our red beads and what can we impact within the system to have a positive impact on less red beads in the system?   0:09:05.5 Andrew Stotz: And just to go back to one thing, you mentioned a total of 50 people. Is this a total, this is a total company offsite or a leadership team offsite?   0:09:13.5 Travis Timmons: It's going to be the entire company. So what we've found is, I think there's just so much value in everybody on the team understanding what's happening. They don't have to be an expert in all of it, bu

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  8. ١٢ يناير

    Fitness Matters: A Deming Success Story (Part 1)

    Travis Timmons shares with host Andrew Stotz how a decade of frustration running his physical therapy practice turned into joy once he discovered Deming's philosophy and embraced systems thinking. Through PDSA cycles, clearer processes, and genuine team involvement, he transformed Fitness Matters from chaotic growth to a scalable organization getting stellar outcomes. His story shows how small businesses can create stability, joy in work, and remarkable results by improving the system rather than pushing harder.   TRANSCRIPT   0:00:02.1 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm here with featured guest Travis Timmons. Travis, are you ready to tell us about your Deming journey?   0:00:19.7 Travis Timmons: Hey Andrew, thanks for having me. And yeah, very excited to share our journey and how impactful it's been on both our company, but also me personally and my family. So, super excited to kind of share where we started before Deming and where we're at today. So I'll just dive right in if that sounds like a good...   0:00:39.9 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And I think just for the audience here, I'll just mention that Travis is physical therapist, founder and president of Fitness Matters in Columbus, Ohio, going on his 27th year of business. And you know, you and I have had some discussions. You've had a lot of great things that you've written and we've gone through and I think it's really an exciting story, particularly for a small mid sized business owner who's just frustrated as hell that things aren't going the way that they want. And I think your frustration a long time ago was a driving force. So I'm excited for you to share your story. So yeah, take it away.   0:01:22.6 Travis Timmons: Yeah, very excited. Yeah, 2000 is when we started, January 2000. So coming up on 27 years, as you mentioned, do physical therapy and wellness. And the first 10 years I was in business, pretty good at being a physical therapist. Started my own business and had no idea how to run a business. I knew a lot about physical therapy, but just kind of shooting from the hip in regard to business. Spent about a decade struggling, frustrated. We were growing, but growing slowly, growing chaotically. No process, it was just a, it was a heavy burden, to be honest with you. We were growing, but it was kind of Herculean effort on my part.   0:02:10.1 Andrew Stotz: I'm just curious how you were feeling at that time. Like there's gotta be a better way or this is the way business is and I just gotta muscle through this or how were you feeling at the time?   0:02:21.0 Travis Timmons: I was feeling frustrated and isolated. Didn't quite know where to turn. Yeah, I guess that's how, and just a burden. Didn't want to let the team down, I did not want the business to fail. I knew we had something different to offer. Just really had no idea how to scale that in a professional way. And along the journey was very fortunate to have a client who had a very successful business, took me under his wing. Ray Crook is his name. Started mentoring me and as luck would have it, he was familiar with Dr. Deming and a very long story short, after several meetings with him over time, some mentoring, I'd read the book along the way, the E-Myth Revisited and had some learnings from that book that really jumped out at me and came to the conclusion, both with reading that book and some feedback from Ray of basically, hey, it's time to grow up and turn this into a real business. If you're going to do this, let's do it right. And at that, around that time he introduced me to Kelly Allen with the Deming Institute. And you know, so we were 10 years into some chaos, had really no process, just would try stuff, see if it stuck or didn't.   0:03:43.5 Travis Timmons: If that didn't work, didn't really have any way to measure if stuff was working well. So really just a lot of chaos. And became introduced to Deming through Kelly Allen about 10 to 11 years into our journey and man, was that a breath of fresh air in terms of like having a direction to go in. After a few meetings with Kelly, him getting a better understanding of what was important to me, I think him just really understanding that I was serious about wanting to turn our organization into a large, professionally run and well run organization that would have a positive impact on people's lives, both team members and clients. I think he kind of, I think that we were so bad off he took pity on me to begin with, just to be honest with you, and he was like, man, this guy needs a lot of help. He could do some good in the world with what the services they have to offer. But if he doesn't figure out how to run a business professionally, they're never going to scale.   0:04:44.0 Andrew Stotz: And it's interesting that you reached out. I mean, there's a lot of people that are stuck in that situation and they really don't, either they don't reach out or they're afraid to reach out or you know, maybe they think there's no solution or nobody's going to help me. And you know, certainly when you're small, you also don't have huge budgets to hire people to come in and fix your business. You know, I'm just curious, like what drove you to even reach out?   0:05:09.8 Travis Timmons: I think I was fortunate enough to, A, have the mentor with Ray. And then secondly, have always been a believer in you got to check your ego at the door and know that you don't know everything. I think I've seen Business owners that are afraid to admit they don't know everything and so they keep things insulated and that just doesn't get you anywhere.   0:05:35.7 Andrew Stotz: Yeah.   0:05:36.3 Travis Timmons: So I just was fortunate kind of how I was raised as arrogance isn't a good thing, so check your ego at the door and learn from, learn from people smarter than you. And so I kind of took that fully at heart and like, all right, I have no idea how to run a business. I need to learn how to do that from really smart people. Read a lot of business books over the years, but the Deming philosophy, when I was introduced to that at the two and a half day seminar, went to that. I got to the Deming two and a half day in, I think that was 2013. So I was 13 years into the entire journey by the time I had met with Kelly, done some learning. And then at a time where the Deming two and a half day was offered in Ohio to where I could get to it, to your point earlier, budget plays into things for small businesses. So I was able to drive to that one and that two and a half day seminar just opened my eyes up to things that I knew in my heart but had no idea how to make that happen.   0:06:46.2 Travis Timmons: And what I mean by that, Andrew, is one of the key things I took away from that first two and a half day is Deming's belief that roughly 96% of issues within an organization are not people issues, but they're process and system issues. And that aligned with my worldview of if you hire good people, which we did, they show up every day wanting to do a good job as long as they have a good system and process to work within something that's professionally put together. So that was takeaway number one that really resonated with me. And the person responsible for said system is me. There's no passing the buck as the owner. And that resonated with me. It's a big responsibility to own a business in terms of the people and clients you're responsible for. And there's no passing the buck. You're responsible for the system at the end of the day.   0:07:42.3 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. I remember when I was 24 attending Deming seminar, when I was working for Pepsi, and it was a little bit different situation than yours. I could see, though, the same thing resonated with me. I could see that people were hemmed in by the system. And even though many people in the factory had really good intentions and they wanted to do a better job, they literally couldn't because they didn't have the tools or the budget or the this or the that. And a lot of times it's easy for senior management, particularly in a big company, to say figure it out, your job is to figure it out. But that only goes so far and there's eventually a point of exasperation for people working in a company that, like, I just, there's a limit here and I'm not going to kill myself trying to do something that I can't change. And so it just, I was coming from a very different perspective as an employee in a huge company versus you at a perspective of, this is my company, I set the rules.   0:08:46.5 Travis Timmons: Yeah, can do whatever we want. And you mentioned something there. It reminds me of a quote from that first two and a half day, and it still sticks with me a decade and a half later. Almost a lot of businesses complain about the term. We have a lot of dead wood in terms of employees. And the quote, I remember Kelly sharing this, it's like, well, did you hire dead wood? Because if you did, that's on you. Or did you hire live wood and kill it and that's on you from your standpoint of, from a system. And I'm like, man, 100% true. And I hired, I had good people on our team, but we didn't have good processes to keep from killing that live wood I would say. So, yeah. And to your point on budget, yeah, I had and still do have quite a bit different budget than Pepsi. Right. So one of the other things that jumped out at me early on that made Deming very approachable and something I could engage with very easily as a small business owner was the concept of PDSAs, the Plan-Do-Study-Act.   0:09:58.5 Travis Timmons: That was a game changer for us because I was like, all right, I don't have to hire a big business consultant. We don't have to hire or pay for a bunch of software. There's very simple things we can do via the Plan, Do Study Act PDSA method that we can create systems or improve upon syste

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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.

المعلومات

  • صناع العمل
    The Deming Institute
  • سنوات النشاط
    ٢٠١٤ - ٢٠٢٦
  • الحلقات
    ١٩٦
  • التقييم
    ملائم
  • حقوق النشر
    © The W. Edwards Deming Institute
  • موقع البرنامج على الويب
    In Their Own Words

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