In Their Own Words

The Deming Institute
  • 4.5 (38)
  • MANAGEMENT
  • UPDATED BIMONTHLY
In Their Own Words

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

  1. APR 14

    Mapping the Process: Path to Improvement (Part 9)

    How can we improve attendance when every school has a different process? In this episode, John Dues continues his exploration of Deming’s philosophy in action, focusing on chronic absenteeism. As part of their third PDSA cycle, John’s team shifts from individual interventions to process standardization—mapping how each of their four campuses handles attendance interventions. The surprising discovery? Each school follows a different process, revealing hidden variation and inefficiencies. By visualizing these systems, the team is not only grasping the current condition but also setting the stage for a reliable, scalable, and effective process. This methodical approach highlights how understanding systems and reducing variation are key to meaningful improvement. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.1 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 Mapping the Process. John, take it away.   0:00:26.7 John Dues: Hey Andrew. It's good to be back. Yeah. For the folks that have been following along for the past several episodes we've been working towards defining this problem more narrowly in terms of this chronic absenteeism issue we've been talking about. And for the last few episodes we've been talking about how the team didn't have enough information to write that precise problem statement. And we took a look at gathering additional information by running a couple PDSA cycles in those first two cycles that we've discussed so far. We know we had zeroed in on a handful of students and ran PDSAs with them and their families about their obstacles getting to school. And then we left off talking about how we were going to shift gears in PDSA cycle three. And instead we were going to focus on standardizing our process. So creating a process map for how we intervene with kids with our attendance teams across the network. So that's what the team is currently working on. But just as a sort of quick reminder to folks, and especially if you're watching, we have this model that we've been working through, this four step improvement model where you set the challenge or direction, grasp the current condition, establish your next target condition, and experiment to overcome obstacles.   0:01:48.1 John Dues: And then like we've talked about several times, we're doing this with the team and that includes people working in the system, people with the authority to change or work on the system, and then at least one person with significant knowledge of the System of Profound Knowledge, like an SOPK coach. And we've been using this model that's on the screen to sort of symbolize or I guess visualize what those four steps look like. You're sort of marching up this mountain towards this challenge or direction. And we've also talked about this long range goal that we've had and we've taken a look at some data where we have our chronic absenteeism rate mapped out over the last eight years or so. We have this long range goal. So this is the direction of the challenge where we're trying to take our chronic absenteeism from above 50% down to 5%. We have the data going back to the 2016/17 school year. Then we also talked about how there's this, not surprisingly, there's this sort of pre-pandemic level of chronic absenteeism, which was again too high. It's not where we wanted it, but we have this major shift up where we've seen this significant jump in chronic absenteeism since the pandemic hit.   0:03:15.0 John Dues: So in those four years, 2020/21, 21/22, 22/23 and 23/24 we were up in the 51, 52, even up into the close to the 60% range in chronic absenteeism at the height of the pandemic. So for PDSA cycle three, really doing two things. So, and we're going to talk about this in the episode today. If you remember back way at the start of this series, we looked at something I called a system flowchart. So we'll kind of revisit that and then we're going to take a look at two process maps that were created by two of our school teams to sort of map their current process. And then we'll walk through, sort of we'll take that, we'll walk through what the plan is for this PDSA cycle three. So let's start by looking back at this system flowchart. I'll sort of reorient you to this. So we have up on the, and this is the current state. So up on the top we have the target system which is attendance. And then we have this aim that is sort of a three part aim.   0:04:42.7 John Dues: We want to define strong attendance for students and staff, make sure everybody's on the same page. We want to ensure that students, families and staff have a shared understanding of what it means to have strong attendance. And then we are working on improving and creating systems that identify and remove barriers to strong attendance for students and staff. And then over on the left hand side we have sort of inputs. So these are things that contribute or their conditions that impact our system. And then in the middle we have our core activities. So the things that are happening that impact attendance and then there's outputs, both negative and positive outputs that come out of this system. And then we get feedback from our customers, we do research on this feedback and then we make design if it's a new system or redesign if it's a current system. And some of these things, some of those contributing conditions are, Ohio has a set of transportation laws. You know, there's our school model and our the way we operate our school hours, our expectations regarding student attendance, our various intervention systems, neighborhood dynamics, how far our families live from school.   0:06:03.4 John Dues: These are all things that contribute to our sort of inputs into our system. And then we have these core activities. And remember, we could just zero in on attendance systems. But there are many other parts of our system that impact whether or not kids come to school. So for one, many of our families are always going to be new to our system. So for example, in our middle schools, where they start with sixth grade some number of those kids are going to be from our elementary schools. Some number of those kids are going to come from other neighborhood schools, but they're all going to be new to that middle school. So whether they're coming from our elementary school or not, you have to think about how is the student and family being onboarded to our system. Another thing we're looking at is school culture and trust. You know, how much trust is in there, in the school. Do they have a strong culture between teachers and families or teachers and students, or the principal and teachers? Then there's academic systems how engaging are classes, those types of things.   0:07:05.7 John Dues: Then we have the attendance intervention systems, which is obviously a core focus. We have health and wellness and changes around mindset since we went through the pandemic. And then finally the third sort of, or sorry, the third, not the third, but the sixth core activity that we talked about was transportation. So we've talked about lots of problems with our busing system this year. So that's another thing that has a big impact on attendance. And so what this group, again is working on the core activity is the attendance intervention systems. What's the process for that? But I had mentioned in an earlier episode that we have another group that's working on transportation and busing and how we can improve that. So the whole point of the system flowchart is there's many, many things that go into something like an attendance rate. And many of these things are very challenging. Some are largely out of our control, but much of it is largely in our control. And we're trying to pull the levers that we think are most important when it comes to student attendance.   0:08:09.2 Andrew Stotz: And just one thing on that, one of the things I just find so frustrating and it's part of this class I'm teaching tonight is how do we scale a business. And one of the ways that's critical to scaling is simplifying. And sometimes, like, when I look at all of this complexity, on the one hand, you're like, okay, well, that's our job, right? Our job is to manage complexity. And that's the reason why we don't have a thousand competitors coming in, because it's complex and it's difficult. And on the other hand, it's like the simplifier in me is like, how do we simplify this? You know, like, I'm just curious about how you see complexity versus simplification. And in particular, it may just be in this stage, you're just putting everything up there, and it's just overwhelming. Like, oh, my God, there's so much involved in just fixing one thing, you know? What are your thoughts on that?   0:09:11.5 John Dues: Yeah, that's, I mean, that's a really good question. It's, I mean, I think it is a complex system because there's so many moving parts. And I think part of the nature of a complex system versus something like a complicated system is that when you try to impact some part of the system that has these ripple effects into other parts of the system, many of which are unattended or unintended consequences. So, yeah, I mean, I think one thing we have working in our favor is very stable senior leadership. So we're pretty good at understanding how we all work. We have a pretty good historical knowledge of how our school system has worked over time. And we have a pretty good holistic view of all of this complexity. Not that we're all able to improve it all at once, but I think we have a pretty good grasp of what's going on. And even a team like this there we could move faster perhaps, but I think we're trying to be pretty deliberate about the changes that we'

    29 min
  2. Getting Started with Quality as an Organizational Strategy: A Conversation with Cliff Norman and David Williams

    APR 7

    Getting Started with Quality as an Organizational Strategy: A Conversation with Cliff Norman and David Williams

    Why would any leader choose to take on a transformation that requires rethinking how they lead, how their organization functions, and how they learn? In this episode, we dive deeper with Cliff Norman and David Williams, co-authors of Quality as an Organizational Strategy, exploring Chapter 11: “Getting Started.” They share powerful stories, practical steps, and the deep-rooted challenges leaders face when shifting from conventional methods to building true learning organizations grounded in Dr. Deming’s philosophy. This conversation highlights why improvement cannot be delegated, why leadership transformation is essential, and how to begin the journey—with clarity, commitment, and courage. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.1 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 are going to continue our conversation with Dave Williams and Cliff Norman about their book Quality as an Organizational Strategy. I found this book fascinating because I think it's addressing something where there's been a bit of a hole and that is how do we think about the strategy of our business? And so we already had our conversation in a prior episode about the overview of the book, but today we're going to be talking about specifically, now this is kind of funny because we're going to be talking about the back of the book and that is chapter 11, getting started. Dave, why don't you take it away?   0:00:53.3 Dave Williams: Well, thanks, Andrew. Thanks for having us back on the Deming podcast. So, as you mentioned, part of the way that the book is laid out is that it describes kind of the foundations that are behind quality as an organizational strategy and begins sort of with an introduction that explains a good bit about how Dr. Deming had this provocation of a need for leaders to transform the way that they approach leading organizations. And part of that was to move not just from process based improvement projects, but to start to think about major systems in the organization and to pursue quality as the overall strategy and create a continuous improvement organization or learning organization. And so the book lays some of the foundation behind the science of improvement or behind profound knowledge that underpin the thinking, walks through quality as an organizational strategy, as a method of five interdependent activities. Then at the end it comes back full circle to say, well, this is great, now you've learned about these theories and methods. But a natural question for any leader would be, how do I get started? And one of the first things that we talk about in that section actually is about why leaders would want to do this transformation.   0:02:30.9 Dave Williams: And this actually came from a conversation that Lloyd and Cliff and I had in 2020 where we were talking about getting on this journey of building the book. And we all kind of recognized that this was really, really hard work. And we were curious or we, we didn't have a good answer of what was our theory about why somebody would deviate from the way in which they work today and embark on a transformational change of the way that they approach leadership, the way that they approach organizations. And actually I ended up going on a journey of interviewing a whole host of leaders who had been influenced by Deming, who had been involved in improvement in healthcare, folks like Dr. Berwick and Paul Batalden and Brent James. I interviewed some folks in the UK and other places, like John Seddon, and asked them, oh and I should Blaine Godfrey, who had been the lead of the Durand Institute, and I posed the question, what causes somebody to want to embark on this change? And many people actually had a hard time articulating it. But the answer that emerged, or actually Blaine Godfrey was the one that kind of framed it the best, I think, for us, was a number of things.   0:03:57.7 Dave Williams: Sometimes it's something like a book like this comes out and people read it and it's interesting and new. Sometimes it's an event happens, a patient safety event or a major accident or something of which causes people to have to change or do something different. Sometimes it's a discouragement with a desire that you know you could do better, but you don't have methods or know how to. So there were a host of things that we listed, and those are some of a sample of them that might invite somebody to say, the way that we're working today is not getting us to the level that we want to. And now we want to embark on something different. And we might look to something like quality as an organizational strategy as a method for us to transform the way that we're working and build on the shoulders of Deming's philosophy and the science of improvement and do it differently.   0:04:56.0 Andrew Stotz: And when I look at the book, you guys are bringing together a lot of different stuff. It's not just a Deming book. It's Deming is a part of this, and that's fascinating. One of the questions I have is when we look at, let's say, a business owner, a business leader is looking for answers, as you said, maybe it's an event, maybe it's a discouragement, maybe it's a feeling like we can do better. Maybe it's just being beaten by competitors. They come to a point where they start looking for answers and they find some fantastic books, authors, ideas, consultants, all this and I think about whether that's Peter Drucker or whether that's the Lean movement or whether that's, let's say Taguchi or something like that is the teachings that you guys are talking about - and I'm going to specifically ask about the teachings of Dr. Deming. Is it more or is it more difficult or less difficult to implement than other books or styles or methods that someone's going to come across?   0:06:08.7 Cliff Norman: I have to quote one of my colleagues here who probably knew about more about Deming than anybody in API or all of us combined, that's Ron Moen, who did, I think it was 88 seminars, four-day seminars with Dr. Deming. Dr. Deming once told him, he said, Ron, I believe you've been to more of these and I've been to. And it's kind of a joke. He had a great sense of humor. But you know, Ron told me the problem with Deming is he's asking us to change. And there's all sorts of things out there that require the management and the leadership, they really don't have to do anything different. And there are several things out there. In fact, Philip Crosby, one of the three gurus during when they launched, he was more the evangelical and had a way of talking to management so that they understood it, which that was his contribution to all that. But when Six Sigma came up and black belts and all that, and Crosby looked at him and says, that's not going to change the system. He said, all you're doing is killing a bear for management, killing a bear for management, and then you'll get a black belt.   0:07:19.9 Cliff Norman: You know, And I thought, wow that's pretty profound. Because the management at that point doesn't have to do anything, just have the black belt ceremony. There's absolutely no change on their part. Where Deming, as Ron says, he's kind of a pain. You've got to learn about variation, you got to learn about Shewhart charts. You've got to be able to put together a family of measures for your organization. You've got to understand your organization's system. You need to understand psychology, you need to understand theory of knowledge and how people learn how they change. And nothing else out there puts that on leaders. And so that was a question that Dave was lending back to. Why would somebody do this to themselves? You know, why would they take on this whole extra thing to learn and all the rest of it. And for the people that I know that have made that, that bridge, the pure joy that they get and the rewards they get from people who are learning and that they're leading and that they're changing and they're able to go to other organizations and repeat this and call them up and say, thank you so much for helping me learn how to be a real leader.   0:08:35.8 Cliff Norman: I mean, that's the reward in it. But it requires a real change on the part of the leader. And I don't know of anything else, Andrew, that actually requires that kind of in depth change. And there was one of our leaders, Joe Balthazar, he had Jane and I do four years in a row with his leadership team, teach them the science of improvement. The same curriculum, same leaders, four years in a row. And the second year I was doing it, I said, don't we need... No, no, Cliff, I want you to do exactly what you did last year. He said, it takes years for people to understand this. And I thought, wow, this is unbelievable. But on the fourth year, the VP of sales walked up to me and he says, I think I figured it out. And I thought, wow. And it does it literally... Because you've got to depart from where you've been and start thinking about how you're going to change and let go of what's made you successful up to this point. And that's hard, that's hard for anybody to do.   0:09:47.2 Cliff Norman: And anybody's been through that four day seminar knows when they crossed that path that all of a sudden they had to say, you know what I've been doing, I can see where I've been, the problem and not the solution. And that's tough for us. That really is tough. And Deming says you have to give up that guilt trip. And once you understand the theory of variation, once you understand systems, once you understand psychology and theory of knowledge, it's time then for you to move on and let go of the guilt. I hope that makes sense. But that's the difficulty in this.   0:10:17.6 Andrew Stotz: It reminds me of two, it made me think about two things. I mean, I was just a 24 year old guy when I attended the seminars that I did, and they weren't even four day. I think they

    1h 4m

  3. MAR 24

    Powerful Learning with PDSA: Path for Improvement Part 8

    It's time for PDSA (Plan-Do-Study-Act) Cycle 2 in John Dues' journey to reduce chronic absenteeism in his schools. His team is using PDSA to quickly test ideas and learn on a small scale. Find out what happened and how PDSA can be a powerful tool for learning. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of a new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. The topic for today is Powerful Learning with the PDSA Cycle, Part 2. John, take it away.   0:00:26.7 John Dues: It's good to be back, Andrew. Yeah, like you said, we, I think for the past three episodes or so, we've been working towards getting a better definition of our problem specific to this chronic absenteeism issue that we're working on this year. I don't know if you remember from last episode, but we have this team working and they've basically said we don't have enough information quite yet to write this precise problem statement. So we decided to gather information running the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle. And last time we focused on the first cycle. This episode, we're gonna focus on a subsequent PDSA cycle, sort of along those same lines. For folks that are watching and perhaps just joining for the first time, I'll kind of share my screen and do a little bit of a review so that everybody can see or know what we're talking about, even if they're just listening for the first time. So we've talked about this improvement model. We're working through this four step improvement model. So set the direction or challenge is the first step. Grasp the current condition is the second step. Third step is establish your next target condition and then fourth, experiment to overcome obstacles.   0:01:44.3 John Dues: And we're doing all this with a team, people working in the system. People have the authority to work on the system and someone with the System of Profound Knowledge knowledge. right. And so, you know, we've talked about setting that challenge or direction. And as we're grasping the current condition, we've actually decided to skip to step four and experiment a little bit so we can get a deeper understanding of this problem that we've been working on. And you'll remember probably as well, did the screen change for you so you can see the chart now?   0:02:21.8 Andrew Stotz: Yeah.   0:02:22.9 John Dues: Yeah. Great. So I thought it'd be helpful to show this again too. So this is our process behavior chart of the chronic absenteeism rates dating back to the 2016/'17 school year. So we have eight years of data in regards to this problem. And you'll remember when we talked about set the direction or the challenge, we wanna basically cut this chronic absenteeism rate we're seeing coming out of the pandemic by a lot. So we're hovering around this 50% chronic absenteeism rate. We wanna cut it to 5%. So that means, you know, 50% or more of our kids, or right around 50% of our kids are missing 10% or more of the school year.   0:03:06.2 John Dues: And this is a trend that we're seeing all over the United States right now. And the other thing that we talked about is when we looked at this process behavior chart, that it's basically like there's a pre-pandemic system of chronic absenteeism, and then there's a post-pandemic system of chronic absenteeism. So, you know, before the pandemic, the rates were too high, but nowhere near to where they are now. So, you know, prior to the pandemic, we were sort of hovering around the, you know, 20 to 30% of kids chronically absent. And then, you know, coming out of the pandemic, it's been more like that, that 50% number that we've, that we've talked about.   0:03:49.4 Andrew Stotz: And so to reiterate for the listeners or the viewers, this is the chronic absentee rate at your school, as opposed to nationwide, which I remember last time you talked about, it's about 30% nationwide, and pre-pandemic, it was about 16%.   0:04:06.5 John Dues: Yeah. Right around there. So, yeah, so I'm talking about the four schools that make up our school system in Columbus, Ohio.   0:04:15.8 Andrew Stotz: Yep.   0:04:16.6 John Dues: And, you know, we have a pretty high percent of our kids are economically disadvantaged. And so the rates in schools that have that demographic tend to be more like ours, in that 40, 50% range. And then, but all schools coming out of the pandemic had much higher rates than what they had pre pandemic. No matter your affluence levels. It's just, just like a lot of things the schools with the most kids living in poverty get hit the hardest when you have these problems, basically. So, yeah, yeah. So what we were, we were studying this problem, and, you know, we have some idea of what's causing our challenges, but we've started running these PDSA cycles to dig into that a little bit more, and I'll, I'll, I'll stop sharing. So that's not distracting. And so we ran this first PDSA cycle we talked about last time, and now we're running, or we've just gotten finished running a second PDSA cycle. So for folks that are new to that, what that means is that we are basically running an experiment to test an idea, an idea about how to improve chronic absenteeism.   0:05:26.6 John Dues: And to do that we plan the intervention, then we do or run the experiment, we study it and then we act on that information. 'Cause that's where the PDSA comes from. So basically the objective specific to PDSA 2 is were or we designed a individualized intervention based on responses we get from interviews with kids using this five whys sort of empathy interview template. Right? And then after we do that, what's happening is that students are actually. So after the five whys is completed with the student, we move right into creating the plan of the PDSA still with that student. So they're part of the process. So that's also sort of a key, I think innovation of this particular round of PDSAs is the student is sitting there as we design the intervention. A student that has some issues with chronic absenteeism. And then basically in this particular plan, we decided we're gonna collect detailed attendance data for two weeks to evaluate the effectiveness of that.   0:06:39.7 Andrew Stotz: When you said this one, are you talking about the PDSA one or two?   0:06:43.5 John Dues: Two. The one. The one you just got done running. The one we're talking about. So the PDSA 2 ran for two weeks. So when I say experiment, I'm not talking about, you know, like a randomized controlled trial that can last a year or two years or five years before you get the results. I'm talking about something you can do in a day, a week, two weeks. My general rule is not to go over a month with these PDSA cycles. It starts to feel like it's too long. I wanna get data back quicker than that on an intervention. And so that's what we did with this PDSA cycle 2. And it was really, the plan was built around this key question. The key question was, will involving students in the design of an individualized intervention to address their chronic absenteeism lead to an increase in their average daily attendance rate during that period of intervention. So we're not taking that for granted just because we're sitting with the kids creating a plan with them. We don't know, we don't know what's gonna happen exactly. And basically step one of that plan was this five wise interviews that I talked about.   0:07:50.2 John Dues: So basically we had four staff members. So each one was assigned a student at their campus that they chose to work with on this initial intervention. And they took a piece of sticky paper and up top they basically wrote, here's our problem, the student's name. So let's say James is not coming to school consistently. And when students miss a lot of school, they're at risk of falling behind academically. And right below that problem statement, then they wrote, why are you not coming to school consistently? 'Cause that's the first why question. So that's sort of the first part of this five whys interview. So it's very simple. You need chart, paper and marker in about 20 minutes to do this. Step two is, then they used the information that they gathered from that five whys interview to design the intervention with the student. And basically what they did was they designed the intervention around the root cause that they got to at the bottom of that five whys sequence. So basically, you know, when they said that, when they asked that first question, you know, why are you not coming to school consistently? The student is then going to say something, right? I miss the bus almost every day.   0:09:10.7 John Dues: And so the next question, the next why question is built on the previous answer from the student. So why do you miss the bus every day? And you kind of keep going. And it doesn't always happen perfectly. Sometimes it takes three questions, sometimes it takes a little more than five. But generally speaking, once you drill down with those five whys, you'll get to sort of a root cause from the interviewee, right? And so then they're basically saying like, you know, based on that root cause we identified, what do you think we can do to improve your daily attendance? And then now they're sort of transitioning from the five whys into the planning of the intervention. And sort of that was step two of the plan. And step three is then actually starting to track the student's daily attendance as they do whatever that plan is across the 10 school days that are in that particular cycle. So that's the plan phase. You know, we had a key question that we designed around, and then the team also makes predictions about what they think is gonna happen during that cycle. That's the plan.   0:10:23.5 John Dues: And then, so then they m

    27 min

  4. MAR 10

    Don’t Be Limited by Quality Management: Misunderstanding Quality (Part 13)

    How does "quality" apply in all areas of an organization? In this final episode of the Misunderstanding Quality series, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz discuss lessons from the first twelve episodes, and the big ah-ha moments that happen when we stop limiting our thinking. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.6 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 Bill Bellows, who has spent 31 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. Today is episode 13 and the title is Quality Management: Don't be limited. Bill, take it away. 0:00:30.5 Bill Bellows: Hey, Andrew. So this is episode. What number did you say it was? 0:00:36.2 Andrew Stotz: 13. Lucky 13. 0:00:38.1 Bill Bellows: Lucky 13. So then for those who are concerned about the use of the number 13, this is episode 14. 0:00:51.0 Andrew Stotz: I thought you're gonna say episode 12A. 0:00:54.7 Bill Bellows: And for those who don't mind the number 13, this is episode 13. And as we talked earlier, if Dr. Deming was to title the episode it would be... It would not be "don't." It would be "do not", do not be limited. So at the start I wanted to go back to review the path we're on. We've been on episode one back in end of May, Quality, Back to the Start. All part of the Misunderstanding Quality series for The Deming Institute. Episode two, we got into the Eight Dimensions of Quality with David Garvin. One of those dimensions was acceptability. 0:01:49.8 Bill Bellows: Another was reliability. Another was I say dependability performance. Okay. And I think it's important in a series about misunderstanding quality to look at the work of David Garvin. Just realize I think it's fascinating to... You move out of the world of the American Society Quality and control charts and whatnot. And that's why I think Garvin's work paints a nice... Gives a nice perspective to not be limited.  And then we got into in the third episode Acceptability and Desirability. Episode four, Pay Attention to Choices and the choice of differentiating acceptability which is I'll take anything which meets requirements, and desirability. 0:02:42.3 Bill Bellows: I want that little doggy in the window. Not any doggy in the window. And then we followed that with episode five, the Red Bead Experiment which for many is their first exposure to Dr. Deming's work. I know when I worked for the Deming Institute for a few years the Red Bead Experiment website was one of one of the most popular pages. I believe another one was the 14 Points for Management. And, personally, I've presented the Red Bead Experiment think just once, just once. And I'm going to be doing it at the 2025 at, let me back up, the Bryce Canyon Deming... The Bryce Canyon...Bryce Canyon Forum. I can't remember the name. It's a partnership between Southern Utah University and The Deming Institute, and we're doing it at Southern Utah University. And on one of those days, I'll be doing the Red Bead Experiment, which takes a lot of time and then studying to present it a few years ago I was getting all the videos that I could find of it, many of them on The Deming Institute web page and none of them have the entire data collection. 0:04:18.5 Bill Bellows: They kind of fast forward through six people putting the... drawing the beads each four times and when you're up on stage trying to do that, I had four people that's, you gotta do a lot of work to make it that exciting. But the reason I present it, I say I present it for a number of reasons. One is to do the classic "The red beads are not caused by the workers are taken separately. They're caused by the system which includes the workers. It's an understanding of variation and introduction to control charts" and all of that is as exposed by Dr. Deming is classic. 0:05:00.7 Bill Bellows: But, I'd like to take it one step further, which is to go back into that desirability thinking and look at the concept that we've talked about of going through the doorway and going past the achievement of zero defects, zero red beads, and realize that there's further opportunities for improvement when you start to look at variation in the white beads. And, that then takes into account how the beads are used. And that gets us into the realm of looking at quality as a system.   Looking at quality with a systems view as opposed... That's good, that's good, that's good. With or without an appreciation on how the bead is used. So anyway, that was episode five. We explored that. Next we got into the differentiation of Category Thinking and Continuum Thinking. 0:05:55.5 Bill Bellows: And for those who haven't listened to it, maybe not in a while, the differentiation is category thinking. Putting things in categories such as red beads and white beads are the... It could be any categories, categories of fruit, categories of religion, categories of political systems. We have categories and then within a category we have variation. We have different. We have apples and oranges and then we have a given type of orange. And then there's variation in the juiciness, ripeness. That's called continuum thinking, which goes back to, if we go back to the red beads and the white beads is notion that the white beads are not uniformly white, not uniform in diameter or weight. 0:06:44.5 Bill Bellows: And, what are the implications there? Well, if we think in terms of categories, red beads and white beads, if all the beads are white have we stopped improving? And Dr. Deming and I believe it was Point 5 of the 14 Points stressed the need for continual improvement. And yes, you can continuously improve and reduce cost, you can continuously reduce cycle time, but can you continuously improve quality? Well, not if you're stuck in a category of good, then the role of that is to just to remind people that there's opportunities to go further when you begin to look at variation in white, which is the essence of looking at how what you're looking at is part of a system, which Dr. Deming was well, well aware of. 0:07:33.7 Bill Bellows: Next we got into the Paradigms of Variation and a big part there was differentiating acceptability. Well, going beyond acceptability was differentiating accuracy from precision. Precision is getting the same result shrinking the variation, otherwise known as getting achieving great piece-to-piece consistency. Metrics that begin with the letter C and sub P could be Cp, Cpk, are the two most popular. Those are measures of precision that we're getting small standard deviations that they are very, very close to each other. But in the paradigms of variation that was what I referred to as Paradigm B thinking we're looking for uniformity. Paradigm A thinking being acceptance, we'll take anything that meets requirements... Or academically called paradigm A. Paradigm C is what Dr. Taguchi was talking about with the desirability, where we're saying I want this value, I want uniformity around this specific value. 0:08:43.9 Bill Bellows: Here what we're looking at is uniformity around the target, around an ideal, otherwise known as piece-to-target variability. And, the idea there is that the closer we are to that ideal, the easier it is for others downstream to integrate what we're passing forward. Whether that's putting something into a hole or does this person we want to hire best integrate into our system. So, integration is not just a mechanical thing. In episode eight we then got into Beyond Looking Good which then shatters the Paradigm A acceptability thinking, going more deeply into the opportunities for continual improvement of quality. 0:09:29.1 Bill Bellows: If you shift to continuum thinking. Next, Worse than a thief coming from Dr. Taguchi. And that's the issue of achieving uniform. Part of what we looked at is the downside of looking at things in isolation and not looking at the greater system. Then episode 10 we look at Are you in favor of improvement of quality? 0:09:53.6 Andrew Stotz: I'm in favor. 0:09:55.7 Bill Bellows: To which he would always say, but of course. That was a reference back to chapter one of The New Economics. And he said everyone's got an answer. Improving quality computers and gadgets. And what we spoke about is Quality 4.0, which is gadgets of the 21st century, tools and techniques. And again, what we said is, there's nothing wrong with tools and techniques. Tools and techniques are about efficiency, doing things well, but they lack what Russ Ackoff would say in asking, are we doing the right things well. And then episode 11 delved into what I've...amongst the things I've learned from Dr. Taguchi, To improve quality, don't measure quality. 0:10:42.5 Bill Bellows: If we have a problem with, we want to reduce scrap, we want to reduce rework, we want to eliminate the problems that the customer has experienced or that someone downstream is experiencing. And what Dr. Taguchi emphasized was start asking, what is the function of the thing we're trying to do? And the idea is that if you improve the function, then you're likely to improve the quality as measured by what the customer is looking for. If you focus on what the... If you focus your efforts on reducing what the customer is complaining about, you're likely to get something else the customer is complaining about. And for more on that, go to episode 11. 0:11:19.0 Bill Bellows: And then episode 12, Do specification limits limit improvement? Which again goes back to what I experienced on a regular basis is in my university courses with people I interact with and consulting is a very heavy emphasis on meeting requirements and moving on. And not a lot of thought of going beyond that or even that there's anything more to do, that's alive and well. And that's reinforced by Six Sigma Quality is filled with that mindset. If you pay atte

    32 min

  5. MAR 3

    Do Specification Limits Limit Improvement? Misunderstanding Quality (Part 12)

    Are your specification limits holding you back from improving your products and services? Should you throw out specifications? What does Stephen Hawking have to do with it? In this episode, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz discuss specifications and variation. 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 Bill Bellows, who has spent 31 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. Today is episode 12, and the title is Do Specification Limits Limit Improvement. Bill, take it away.   0:00:31.4 Bill Bellows: Hey, Andrew. How's it going? All right.   0:00:33.8 Andrew Stotz: Great. Great to have you back and great to see you. For those that are just listening, you can watch the video on DemingNEXT. But for those listening, Bill looks handsome, full of energy, ready to go, and it's my 8:30 in the morning in Bangkok, Thailand. So let's rock Bill.   0:00:56.3 Bill Bellows: So. I spoke recently to one of the folks I'd met on LinkedIn that have listened to our podcast and took the offer to reach out and we now talk regularly. And I just wanna say I've gotta, before we get to some, the story behind the title, I wanted to share, a heads up. And if anyone would like a copy of this article that I wanna, take some excerpts from, then just reach out to me on LinkedIn and ask for a copy of the article. The article's entitled 'A Brief History of Quality,' and there's three parts. So it's about 10 pages overall, and it was published in 2015 in the Lean Management Journal, which I don't believe still exists. I was writing articles at the end once a month for this journal, I think based out of the UK.   0:02:04.3 Bill Bellows: I think there was a manufacturing magazine that still exists and had this as a special topic and my interest was bringing Dr. Deming's ideas, to the Lean community, which is why it was a Lean Management Journal, so the article was entitled 'Brief History Equality.' And so I wanna get to those topics, but when I was reading the article, reminding myself of it, I thought, oh, I'll just share this story online with Andrew and our audience. And so here I'm just gonna read the opening paragraph. It says, "several years ago, I had the opportunity to attend an hour-long lecture by Stephen Hawking," right? So the article was written in 2015. So the presentation by Hawking would've been maybe 2012, 2013. And back to the article, it says, "he, Hawking, returns to Pasadena every summer for a one-month retreat, a ritual he started in the 1970s, several thousand attendees sitting in both a lecture hall and outdoors on a lawn area complete with a giant screen were treated to an evening of reflection of the legendary Cambridge physicist."   0:03:14.3 Bill Bellows: And I'll just pause. I have friends who work at JPL and they got me seats, and they got me an inside seat in the balcony, front row of the balcony, but they had big screens outside. I mean, it was like a rock concert for Stephen Hawking, right?   0:03:34.3 Andrew Stotz: That's amazing.   0:03:34.9 Bill Bellows: Oh, it was so cool. Oh, it was so cool. So anyway, "his focus was my brief history offering us a glimpse of his life through a twist on his treatise, A Brief History of Time. His introspective presentation revealed his genius, his humility, his search for black holes, his passion for life, not to mention his dry sense of humor. It ended with questions from three Caltech students, the last of which came from a postdoc student, an inquiry Hawking had likely tackled many times before."   0:04:06.6 Bill Bellows: So realize he's answering the questions through a voice activated thing. And it appeared that the questions were, his answers were prerecorded, but they're still coming through a device that is a synthesized voice. But I get the impression that he knew the questions were coming, so we in the audience were hearing the questions for the first time. But he had already answered the questions. So anyway, it ended with questions. There was an undergraduate student, a graduate student, then a postdoc, and I said, "the last of which came from a postdoc student, an inquiry Hawking had likely tackled many times before. And the student relayed the story of an unnamed physicist who once compared himself to both Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein." So this unnamed physicist compared himself to Einstein and Newton each placed on a scale of 1 lowest to 10 highest. "With this context, Hawking was asked where he would rank himself."   0:05:22.0 Bill Bellows: So this physicist said, oh, you know, Andrew, I see myself as this. And so the guy relays the story, and he says to Hawking, so given this other physicist said this, where would you rank yourself? "Well, I do not recall the relative rankings posed in the query. I'll never forget Hawking's abrupt reply. He says, “anyone who compares themselves to others is a loser." And I found online that he was, that commentary, this was not the first time he said that.   0:06:04.9 Andrew Stotz: Right.   0:06:06.5 Bill Bellows: And I just thought, oh, anyone who compares himself to others is a loser. And then the end of the paragraph is "in reference to Dr. Deming," Andrew, "variation, there will always be. So can't we just get used to variation?" So the title, are you in favor? No, no, no, no. That was last time. Are you in favor of improving the quality was number 10. Number 11 was to improve quality, don't measure quality. For 12, the specification limits limit improvement.   0:06:46.9 Andrew Stotz: Now, if that was true, first of all, that would be a little scary, 'cause we spend a lot of time working on specification limits. There's a lot of people working on that.   0:06:55.4 Bill Bellows: But here's what's behind the title. In 1995, I was invited to speak, not for the first time, but for the first time I ever spoke to an audience of the American Society of Quality. It was a San Fernando Valley chapter. I forget the number. I've spoken there many, many times over the years, but this is the first time I ever spoke to quality professionals as opposed to project managers or Society of Manufacturing Engineers. I was there with my wife. There's dinner, then after dinner in the next room, and the chairs were set up, theater style, that'd be 70, 80 people. And I was talking about what I would, I mean, things I still talk about, I talk about new things, to have new things done. But the big thing I was trying to get across the audience is, the difference between meeting requirements, which in this series, we call it acceptability versus desirability, which is, I want this value, I want this professor, I want to date this person. And so I was relaying that concept to that audience. And the question I asked that night was do specification limits limit improvement?   0:08:31.0 Bill Bellows: And there was a guy about seven rows back, and I built up to that. That wasn't the opening thing, but what I was really pushing on was a focus on Phil Crosby's goal of striving for zero defects. And, then what? Once you achieve that, then what? And we've talked about the doorway and that's like the door is closed, we get up to the doorway and we've achieved zero defects. And, what we've talked about is going through the doorway and the attitude is, well, why open the door? I mean, don't open the door, Andrew. There's a wall on the other side of that door, Andrew. So it might be a door, but everybody knows there's a wall behind it, and I was poking at that with this audience, and prepared to show them the value proposition of going through that.   0:09:34.0 Bill Bellows: So anyway, I remember I got to the point of asking, do specification limits limit thinking about improvement or something like that. And a more senior gentleman, about seven or eight rows back, and fortunately, he was seven or eight rows back, fortunately, because he stood up and he says, "Are you saying we don't need specification limits?" There's a lot more anger in his voice. And I said, "No," I said, "I'm saying I think they limit our thinking about improvement." And, but he was really upset with me, and I was deliberately provoking because again, you and I have talked about, how can we inspire through this podcast and other podcasts that you do with the others, to get people to think about the possibilities that Dr. Deming shared with us. And it's not believing that there's a door that you can't walk through. You open the door and there's an opening and you can go through. There's a lot more going on there. So anyway, so I had prepared them. The whole reason for being there was to share what we were doing at Rocketdyne, and not just talk about the possibilities, but show them the possibilities. But he got very upset with me. But if he was in the front row, he might've hit me.   0:11:08.9 Andrew Stotz: May have thrown a book at you.   0:11:11.5 Bill Bellows: Oh, he...   0:11:12.2 Andrew Stotz: May have thrown a Specification Limit at you.   0:11:17.0 Bill Bellows: Twice I've had people get, well, I've gotten a number of people upset with me over the years, but that night was, I'll never forget, and I'll never forget, because my wife was sitting in the front row and she asked me never to be that provocative again. It might be dangerous to my health. But I was doing another class, also for the American Society of Quality, I was a member of the local chapter, and there was a big movement within Rocketdyne that all Quality Engineers within Rocketdyne be Certified Quality Engineers. And so two or three of us from Rocketdyne got involved in helping the local chapter train people to prepare to take this one day exam. Very, very, very rigorous. And it's a valuable credential for quality profession

    42 min

  6. FEB 24

    Plan-Do-Study-Act: Path for Improvement (Part 7)

    Can you use Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) during the information-gathering phase of an improvement project? Yes! Join John Dues and host Andrew Stotz as they discuss how John's team used PDSA to learn more about chronic absenteeism, their surprising findings, and what they'll do next. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.8 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 powerful learning with the PDSA cycle. John, take it away.   0:00:25.5 John Dues: Yeah, Andrew. It's good to be back. For the past two episodes or so, we've been working towards defining the problem of our chronic absenteeism issue, of course, we have a problem with chronic absenteeism, but we're trying to narrow that down and get a more specific problem statement. Last time we talked about how our improvement team, basically, had come to the conclusion after a few weeks of study that we didn't have enough information to write that specific, precise problem statement. So what we decided to do, and we started looking at this last time, was we started to gather additional information through a Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle. So that's what we'll focus on today, is this first PDSA cycle, and I think it's good to know that you can use PDSAs to run an experiment to test a new idea, but you can also run a PDSA to gather more information. Those are both very worthwhile uses of the PDSA cycle. So I go to share my screen just so I have that model up so that people who can see it, for those that are viewing. Can you see that now?   0:01:33.8 Andrew Stotz: Coming up. Okay, we can see it.   0:01:36.6 John Dues: All right, great. So you remember, we've been working through this four-step process for those who are hopping in for the first time or as a review for those that have been following along. So we have these four steps: set the challenge or direction, grasp the current condition, establish your next target condition, and then an experiment to overcome obstacles. And remember, we've been working through this team, that's a combination of people working in the system, people who have the authority to actually change the system, and then the System of Profound Knowledge coach. So I think that's a pretty powerful combination of people, and that's our team here working on this chronic absenteeism problem. You also remember that we have this long-range goal that this challenge that is to improve our chronic absenteeism from right around 50% to down closer to 5%, and I don't know if you remember this, but a number of episodes ago, I showed you the data we had over time, and we just had three years of data. Since that time I showed you that first run chart, I've actually gone back and added chronic absenteeism rates for our schools going all the way back to the 2016 - '17 year, and I think it's worth it to just take another quick look at those rates over time in a process behavior chart.   0:03:00.2 Andrew Stotz: Exciting.   0:03:01.5 John Dues: So, yeah. This is our chart. So we add more days so why not display it in this way. So what this chart is, is again a process behavior chart, we have school years going back to the 2016-'17 school year, and then through last school year. And we have the blue dots displaying the chronic absenteeism rate for each of those school years across our school system, and then the green is... The green line is that central line, it's the average of all years, the red lines are those natural process limits that sort of tell us where we can expect our data to fall given that this is a predictable system. So you can see right off the bat, something that's pretty obvious is that the first four years of data are below that central line, and then the last four years of data are above that central line. And of course, it's not too hard to sort of recognize that the pandemic happened towards the end of the 2019-'20 school year, and then sort of... We were all remote heading into that 2021 school year, and then for a number of years after we were in remote or hybrid, and so you can see very clearly that while there was chronic absenteeism in our system prior to the pandemic, after the pandemic, it exploded and it has not subsided.   0:04:28.7 John Dues: So in a typical year prior to the pandemic, we were somewhere around that 25, about a quarter of the kids give or take, depending on the year, of the kids were chronically absent, and then after the pandemic, we can see it sort of... Or at the begining of the pandemic, explodes up and then has settled around this, right about 50% average.   0:04:51.1 Andrew Stotz: And the fact that it's remained at this much higher level of, let's say 50-55% tells you that there's like... It has had somewhat of a permanent impact, whereas some people may think that the COVID situation caused a spike in chronic absenteeism up to 70% or whatever that number was, and then it came back to normal. But it's far away from normal.   0:05:26.4 John Dues: Yeah, and I haven't done a deep analysis. But in addition to the chronic absenteeism, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is like the gold standard, the report card for the nation, a nationally known test given every couple of years, that data shows that the 4th and 8th graders that take that test across the country in ELA and math, the scores are down coming out of the pandemic as well and have not rebounded. So I think that data is important. I'm not necessarily saying one way or the other, what we should have done, but what I am saying is like when we make decisions like shutting down schools, it's not just a decision that has an impact in the moment, there are ramifications on an ongoing basis. And we should sort of take that calculus into consideration when we're deciding what to do in a situation like that.   0:06:20.0 Andrew Stotz: And this also shows that you're taking on a pretty serious challenge because...   0:06:23.8 John Dues: Very serious. Yeah.   0:06:25.0 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, it's serious for the students, but it's also serious in the sense that it's been lingering at this very high level of chronic absenteeism, so, okay.   0:06:37.0 John Dues: Yeah.   0:06:37.5 Andrew Stotz: Shocking.   0:06:38.1 John Dues: Yeah, it is pretty shocking.   0:06:38.7 Andrew Stotz: That's not happening in Asia.   0:06:40.6 John Dues: No, and it's... I think a number of places in the United States, the learning chronic absenteeism has bounced back, but in the places where you expect where there's, especially high concentrations of poverty and things like that. It's sort of remained a serious issue even depending how you mark the end of the pandemic, two or three years after the primary part of the pandemic anyway. The height of the pandemic, if you will. So, ongoing challenges for sure. So what I said was that the team was going to run this initial PDSA cycle to gather more information, of course, there were some initial thoughts on why kids were missing so much school. We've talked about these transportation, different expectations that have been set for when to stay home, family and instability, those types of things. But again, we want to further test those assumptions early on in the project. So the key question that we were looking at is, for this first PDSA cycle, at least was will the combination of a what we call an empathy interview, which is just like where we sit down with a student or the family and try to better understand what's going on, and then daily attendance tracking was the other part of this, will that lead to a modest increase in the students average daily attendance rate during the period of the intervention.   0:08:11.9 John Dues: So even though we weren't necessarily testing a change idea, there was this sort of like... We framed it as a modest intervention in terms of sitting down with the kids and then doing this daily tracking and showing them the data. And a key part of this plan phase is we had all of our team members predict what they thought would happen with the four students that we chose to have those interviews with and track the daily attendance of during Cycle 1. So we had everybody really think through, "Okay, what do we think will happen when we put this plan in place?" And that's going to be really important because when we actually run the test, we want to compare the predictions to what actually happens, and that's where a lot of the learning happens from a PDSA cycle.   0:09:02.9 Andrew Stotz: And just for the listeners or viewers out there, why is it important to do that? Some people would say just do it and find out what the result is.   0:09:12.3 John Dues: Well, if you don't take a stance basically before the intervention happens or before the plan is put in place, then there's no learning that can really happen because whatever happens happens. But you didn't sort of say, "Here's what I think's going happen." And a lot of times, we quantify that prediction, and then what you can see is the difference between those two things is not only the learning, but it's also an indication of how well you understand your system. So what I mean is, if we put an intervention in place and I say, "Okay, I think this is going to have a 15% increased impact on whatever it is, a test score or attendance in this case," and then it has no impact, then I don't have an understanding really of what's going to work to fix whatever I'm trying to fix. But if the prediction bears out and it's pretty close to what actually happens, then that means, oh, I have a pretty good grasp on what's going on in my system. Yeah, kind of makes you put a stake in the ground, and it makes you mentally when you're doing it, it makes you thi

    29 min

  7. FEB 18

    To Improve Quality Don’t Measure Quality: Misunderstanding Quality (Part 11)

    In this episode of Misunderstanding Quality, host Andrew Stotz and Bill Bellows discuss what not to measure when it comes to quality. Bill offers some great examples to show how organizations get it wrong, and how to get it right. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, we're gonna have a lot of fun, who has spent 31 plus years now that it's 2025, helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities in the episode, today is episode 11, and the title is "To Improve Quality, Don't Measure Quality". Bill, take it away.   0:00:35.6 Bill Bellows: Thank you, Andrew. And, so the title of episode 10, came from chapter 10... Chapter 1 of The New Economics, and I used a quote from Dr. Deming, which was, "Are you in favor of the improvement of quality?" Which Dr. Deming says, "Are you in favor of the improvement of quality? We can have a national referendum, yes or no?" Everyone says yes. Then he says... Then he say, "We could have a secret ballot." And... But I... At the beginning of the podcast, I had said, "Are you in favor of quality?" And it's... No, it's, "Are you in favor of the improvement of quality?" And so today I wanna, in episode 11, share it with our listeners and viewers, more of the profound insights from Genichi Taguchi. But I think, what I was just thinking is saying, "Are you in favor of quality?" And I've used that quote, which now I now realize it's a misquote. It's not, "Are you in favor of quality?" It's "Are you in favor of improvement of quality?" But in seminars, what I've done is used the quote, the misquote, I would say Dr. Deming would ask, "Are you in favor of quality?" And he would say, "We're gonna have a secret ballot. Is everyone in favor of ballot?" In quality, everyone says yes. So I would go through that.   0:02:16.3 Bill Bellows: And then I would go to the next question, and I would say to the audience, I'd say, "Okay. Dr. Deming made reference to secret ballot. So I wanna do a secret ballot. I want you to close your eyes, and I'm gonna ask you a question, and if your answer is yes, raise your hand. But I want you to close your eyes when you raise your hand, 'cause I don't want you to raise your hand 'cause everybody else does. Okay, so close your eyes." And I say, "Are you in favor of teamwork?" And all the hands go up. [laughter] And it's not so much "Are you in favor of improvement of teamwork?" But it's the idea that, acceptability saying this part is acceptable, as we've shared in prior episodes, is the essence of looking at that part, my task, my effort in isolation. And what that has to do with teamwork, I question. Now, with a few of us at Rocketdyne years ago used to talk about, we would say, you give out a term paper assignment, the term paper must be between 10 and 20 pages long. And what happens? They're close to 10 pages. Then I would share, we'd tell Allison, our daughter, I'd say when she was in high school, "Be home by between 8:00 and 10 o'clock," and she shows up around 10 o'clock.   0:03:51.6 Bill Bellows: And I would show a distribution over there. Then I would say, "What about a machinist? The machinist is given a hole to machine. And what does machinist do is machine the hole on the low side, and then a machinist is machining the outer diameter of a shaft or a tube. And what does machinist do? Machines to the high side." And so I would show those four distributions either on the low side or the high side, and say, "What do they all have in common?" And people would say, "Each of those people's looking out for themself. They're focusing on their work in isolation." Then I would say, "So what do you call that in a non-Deming company or in a... " In the first podcast there is a, called it a Red Pen Company or a ME organization, or a Last Straw companies... What do you call that behavior where people look at the requirements and say, "What's best for me?" What do you call that? What do you call, people scratch their head? We say... You ready? "Teamwork."   [laughter]   0:05:00.6 Bill Bellows: And everybody laughs. And then I turn to somebody in class and I say, "So Andrew, are you a team player?" And Andrew says, "Yes." And I say, "Andrew, if you machine the holes to the low side, are you a team player?" And you might say, "I'm not sure." And I would say, "Say yes." And you'd say, "Okay. I say yes." And I say, "Okay, Andrew, who's on your team?" And you say, "Me." "So, oh, you are a team player, man."   0:05:24.2 Andrew Stotz: I'm a team player. Team Andrew always wins.   0:05:28.2 Bill Bellows: Yeah. And I would say, so I say, "In a non-Deming company, everyone's a team player. All right. But who's on the team?" So I would say to people, "You'd be a fool not to be on your own team. The only question is, who else is on your team?" All right. Back to Dr. Taguchi to improve quality, don't measure quality. And I was, got into this in an explanation with some others recently, and somebody was showing me a bunch of defect rate data involving some process. And the question was, how to apply this occurrence of defect rate data to Dr. Taguchi's loss function. And so, again, reminder to our listeners, acceptability is everything that meets requirements is okay. Either I am unaware of differences or the differences don't matter, any parking spot, any professor any Thermo 2, any doctor and desirability is "I want this doctor, this parking spot, this, this, this, this, this." And so not just anything that meets requirements.   0:06:50.3 Bill Bellows: And Dr. Taguchi's work has a lot to do with that thinking. And Andrew, yeah, I'm on a month, on a regular basis, meeting more and more people that are listening to the podcast and reaching out to me on LinkedIn. And one shared with me recently then, and he started to listen to this series, and he said, he never thought about desirability. He says everything he knows, everything he sees every day, is acceptability. And he's like, "You mean, there's more than that?" And it's like, "Hello. That's what our series is trying to do." So...   0:07:26.6 Andrew Stotz: And let me introduce you to door number three, which opens you up into this whole 'nother world of...   0:07:35.6 Bill Bellows: Yes.   0:07:35.7 Andrew Stotz: The interconnectedness and understanding quality from the impact on all the different parts of the organization, not just the one thing and the one area. Yep.   0:07:46.6 Bill Bellows: Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly.   0:07:48.9 Andrew Stotz: But that's door number three. Now, we don't wanna go through that right off the bat, but when you go through it, unfortunately door number three disappears as you walk through it, and it's a wall...   [laughter]   0:08:00.4 Andrew Stotz: And you can't go back because now you understand that what is a system, what is the interconnectedness of everything, and once you see that, you can't unsee it.   0:08:09.6 Bill Bellows: That's right. Now, it's like, it's a holistic view in which... And a from a holistic perspective, parts don't exist, parts of exist, but everything is connected.   0:08:27.4 Andrew Stotz: Right.   0:08:28.2 Bill Bellows: And what does that mean? So anyway...   0:08:30.1 Andrew Stotz: And just to put that into context, let's just take a car. A customer never buys a part. And they don't buy a jumble of parts, they buy the car. So to the customer's perspective, it's even more meaningless, the independent parts of that.   0:08:50.3 Bill Bellows: When I would go to Seattle and do training when Rocketdyne was owned by Boeing, and I'd be doing training for people working on commercial airplanes or 737s, 47s and whatnot. And one of the jokes I would use is that, "Hey, 747... " People went, "What's a 747?" How about 787? If I was today, I'd say "a 787 is not a bunch of parts that fly in close formation." But that is, the mindset is that... But anyway, so acceptability is looking at the parts in isolation, looking at things in isolation, it's assigning a grade to a student, it's performance appraisals, that's all about isolation, it's thinking, "I won the game, I get an award. I lost the game." All of that thinking, from engineering to, how we look at human resources, the idea that the savings add additional only works when the activities are independent. So that's all acceptability, looking at things in isolation. Desirability in this idea of a preferred value, I don't know that anyone contributed to that, besides Dr. Taguchi. In fact, this morning, I was talking with some friends overseas about Joseph Juran's work. And, do you remember last time you and I worked, I was sharing with them that our last podcast followed the last meeting I had with these friends in Europe. And I said that conversation led to our podcast conversation about Quality 4.0, and it's all acceptability, acceptability, acceptability, meet, meet, meet requirements.   0:10:35.6 Bill Bellows: This very conversation. And I said, I went back and did some research on what Joseph Juran... How Juran defined quality. 'Cause I looked at the ASQs definition of quality and it gave two definitions of quality, one attributed to Juran talking about quality as fitness for use, and then Philip Crosby's definition is, meeting requirements. But you may recall, I said, there is no explanation of how Dr. Deming defined quality. Yeah, maybe that will come. But, so I was sharing that with them, and also shared with them a model I've used. And it might have come up in our first series, but I think the classic model within organizations is, I work, I follow a bunch of steps to make a part, a thing, a module, something. And if all the requirements are met, I hand off to you, you're downstream. And then likewise, there's others i

    33 min

  8. FEB 10

    Diving Deeper into Defining the Problem: Path for Improvement Part 6

    Join John Dues and Andrew Stotz as they go one step deeper into finding the precise problem you want to improve. Sometimes taking big actions means starting small. TRANSCRIPT Diving Deeper into Defining the Problem: Path for Improvement (Part 6)   0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. And the topic for today is more on defining the problem. John, take it away.   0:00:23.5 John Dues: It's good to be back, Andrew. Yeah, so it's been a minute, but two episodes ago we just kind of refreshed. We discussed how helpful it is to make sure we see the system in which we work whenever we're starting an improvement project. And then in this last episode, we took the sort of next step and we started working towards defining a specific problem. And like you said, we're going to dive deeper into that topic today. For those that have been following along, you'll remember that we've been walking through this four step improvement model. Step one, set the challenge or direction. Two is grasp the current condition. Three is establish your target condition, and four, experiment to overcome obstacles. And then again, we've said repeatedly, we're doing all of these steps with this team that has three parts.   0:01:18.1 John Dues: The people working in the system, again, for us, that's teachers and students a lot of the time, and then those that have the authority to work on the system, that might be a principal, that might be a teacher depending on the project, maybe it's the superintendent, if it's the whole system. And then this System of Profound Knowledge coach is that third part that's often missing, at least in school improvement. So we have this nice model and this nice graphic. And then what we've also been sort of layering on top of that is this improvement process.   0:01:48.9 John Dues: So in each of these steps in the model, we have a number of steps that we're taking to be able to sort of achieve that. One of the things though, that sort of like a key organizing question in step one in the model is we asked where do we want to be in the long run, right? And so we're thinking through this longer range goal, typically in the timeframe of something like six months to three years. And if we achieve this, it's really going to differentiate us from other schools in our case or maybe businesses or hospitals or whatever it may be. And we've also sort of said that this is a stretch goal and it's at the outset we don't know how to achieve it. It almost seems impossible.   0:02:31.8 John Dues: And so for us, the key thing we're working on at United Schools here in Columbus is that we've have this really high chronic absenteeism rate coming out of the pandemic, and we have a goal to get that down much lower. So right now, about 50% of our kids are chronically absent. And I think I've said this before, we're trying to get that down to closer to something like 5%. So it's a pretty, pretty weighty problem and a pretty, very ambitious goal, I would say.   0:03:04.3 Andrew Stotz: Yep.   0:03:06.7 John Dues: So last time, what we said was, at this stage in the process, we've stepped back, we looked at some tools that help us see the system, and now we're doing that same thing for defining the problem. And we talked about there's some really useful questions to ask at this stage. The first one that we talked about as a group is how is the project being funneled from a general to more specific problem? We start with this sort of broad problem about chronic absenteeism, and we're trying to narrow the specific problem that we're going to work on. And then once we have that narrower view, we'll get all the way down and answer the question, what is the precise problem statement? And that's kind of our focus for today.   0:03:57.8 John Dues: Now, we won't get to the precise problem statement today, but we're trying to figure out the things that we need to do to get there. So last episode, I reviewed a tool we use at this step in the process called a Problem Statement Readiness Check. So we wrote this problem focus area, and this is really important. I've repeated this like, we use these tools because it helps us organize the group's thoughts and put it into writing. And that's really, really powerful. So we wrote this problem focus area, this sort of broader sort of characterization of the problem as we see it.   0:04:34.4 John Dues: And then we just listed out, what have we learned so far? What insights have we gained? And then we also listed a number of questions that still needed to be answered. And then we basically, as a group, we have this improvement team that meets weekly on Friday mornings. Then we filtered all that learning through six questions. First question is, has our team investigated multiple perspectives on the problem focus area? And actually, in the document, we write our evidence, and then we say, do we feel like the evidence is weighty enough that we've met the standard of that question, yes or no? So that particular question, we check no.   0:05:20.6 John Dues: The second question was, have you challenged assumptions our team held about why the problem occurs? And again, we've done some of that, but we were like, overall I don't think we've challenged enough of those assumptions. So we checked no for that question as well. And then we said, have you gained useful insight into why previous efforts haven't been successful? And we said no to that one.   0:05:45.7 John Dues: And the last two questions were, has your team gained sufficient insight into student needs to give you confidence that you know which kinds of improvements will lead to improved student experiences outcomes? Said no to that one. And then the last question was, have you identified existing school based practices or processes connected to the problem that might be improved? And for that one we said yes. And so again, there's no right or wrong answers here. But by having these six questions, a key sort of step at this point is down at the bottom it says, if the team checks three or more boxes, we'll move on to draft the problem statement, that precise problem statement. And if the team hasn't checked at least three yeses, then we're not going to do that. We sort of feel like if we haven't answered at least half of those questions to our satisfaction, then there's probably some more learning that needs to happen. So in this case, this is... Oh, sorry, go ahead.   0:06:42.5 Andrew Stotz: I wanted to ask because I know sometimes people probably would sit in something like this and they're like, come on, why do we have to go through all this? We know what the problem is, let's go, let's solve it now. What is the risk if you skip this type of stuff?   0:07:00.4 John Dues: Well, and that's... Interestingly, this group is mainly made up of a couple principals, a couple deans on the dean of student side or we have these dean of family and community engagements that are really involved with families especially that have attendance issues. There's a couple people that are sort of like attendance officers and then there's a couple sort of systems leaders, myself and another guy. And in this group, you don't actually have a lot of that. Where you get a lot of that type of thing is when you have the CEO or the superintendent in the room and there's a lot of urgency and pressure on those folks coming from different constituencies. But the problem is if you don't sort of slow down and study it and do that thoroughly, then what happens is you move forward. The solutions are miss, sort of, aligned to the problem and you end up wasting resources, time, money, whatever.   0:07:57.9 Andrew Stotz: And I guess you lose credibility too, that you go back and say, okay, now we're going to do our next thing. Well, we didn't really really succeed with our last one.   0:08:07.6 John Dues: Yeah. And in education, especially urban education, but in education generally, the average urban superintendent is at the helm for about three years. And so what happens is that they then turn over and there's a whole nother set of initiatives that the new person brings. And we call this initiative fatigue, where you constantly have these initiatives. Most of the people on the front line know these things aren't going to work from the outset because it's not the real problems that they're seeing in their classrooms and they sort of have to go along to get along type of deal. But over time, you just sort of wear people out and then they stop really trying that improvement. But with this team, what we're doing, we have the people that are on the ground sort of dealing with these attendance issues day to day, and they're a part of building the solution. So they have a lot of investment, I think, in developing the solution on the front end.   0:09:02.6 Andrew Stotz: A little corollary to that is the idea of family businesses versus public companies. In family businesses in Asia and particularly, which I'm familiar with, they have an amazing ability to have continuity in senior leadership in the values and that type of thing that you see is very hard to have in public company unless they're run by the founder and the founders... And it's... And the founder's been running it for 20 years or whatever.   0:09:29.5 John Dues: Yeah.   0:09:29.9 Andrew Stotz: In fact, I see in my own coffee business that just the fact that my business partner, the founder, has been running it for 30 years brings something that our competitors don't have.   0:09:40.3 John Dues: Yep, absolutely. And stability that... Sorry. Sorry, go ahead.   0:09:44.8 Andrew Stotz: No, I mean, and that can beco

    24 min
See All (177)

4.5
out of 5
38 Ratings

About

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

Information

  • Creator
    The Deming Institute
  • Years Active
    2014 - 2025
  • Episodes
    177
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © The W. Edwards Deming Institute
  • Show Website
    In Their Own Words

You Might Also Like

To listen to explicit episodes, sign in.

Stay up to date with this show

Sign in or sign up to follow shows, save episodes, and get the latest updates.
Select a country or region

Africa, Middle East, and India

Asia Pacific

Europe

Latin America and the Caribbean

The United States and Canada