See the System: Path for Improvement (Part 4)

Before you jump into tools and solutions, you need to take a step back. In this episode, John Dues and Andrew Stotz discuss the four questions you need to ask in order to make the system you want to work on visible, and decide on a direction.

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 am 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, what is the topic for today, John?

0:00:25.4 John Dues: See the System.

0:00:27.3 AS: All right. Well, why don't you take it away?

0:00:30.3 JD: All right. Great. Yeah, it's good to be back. Yeah, just as a quick refresher for people following along in the series, so two episodes ago we briefly talked about the importance of framing the challenge as an improvement goal. And then last episode, if you remember, we went deeper into those three sort of faces of performance measurement. There was research, there was accountability, and then there was improvement. And if you remember, you took the avocado quiz and you got 100% on that quiz. But the whole purpose of sort of taking that time to dive into those three different types of measurement or three different types of goals was this idea that problems arise when measures aren't used for their intended purpose. And what we talked about was, if you're gonna do a research goal, then, you know, the basic goal for research is to contribute to the knowledge base.

0:01:32.4 JD: And for accountability, the purpose of the goal is to determine the application of rewards and sanctions. And then for improvement, the goal is to learn our way to a system that produces a higher level of performance. And basically, at the end of that sort of episode, we established that the challenge or direction should be framed as an improvement goal, in my opinion, and not as an accountability goal, not as a research goal. And then we have this model that we've been working through which is up on the screen for those that are also watching the podcast, and it's this four-step improvement model. So we've outlined these steps. So step one is to set the direction or challenge. That's what's gonna be your improvement goal, not your accountability goal.

0:02:28.7 JD: Step two is to grasp the current condition or conditions on the ground where you are in your organization. Step three is to establish the next target condition. Step four is to experiment, overcome obstacles in the way of meeting that next target condition on the way to that ultimate goal or that direction or challenge that you've set for your organization. And then we've said multiple times that all of the steps are done with this team that's including those working in the system, those with the authority to work on the system, and then someone that has this System of Profound Knowledge lens. That's sort of a quick recap. And so what I thought we could do today is to sort of go back to, actually to step one.

0:03:16.8 JD: So we've gotten an overview of it, and talk about some other things to think about when you're on this particular step. And if you remember in step one of the model, what we're asking is, where do we want to be in the long run? Or what do we as a team or as an organization, what do we wanna accomplish? And we've talked about that this is this longer range goal, and it's a big goal. It may seem even impossible or nearly impossible at the outset, but if we achieve it, what we're saying is this thing, whatever it is, is really gonna differentiate us from other organizations, from other schools in our case, or you know, it could be differentiating you from other businesses or other hospitals or whatever the thing is that you're working in.

0:04:07.9 JD: We said this challenge or direction typically has this sort of long-term timeframe, six months to three years as sort of a rough guide. And then I talked about this example, one of our goals or challenges that we sort of set in our organization is we wanna significantly reduce student chronic absenteeism. If you remember, when we looked at this a couple episodes ago, that number rose significantly coming out of the pandemic. And so it's right around in the 50% range. So 50% of our students are chronically absent, which is a very high number. And we wanna take that all the way down to 5%. So right now as things currently stand, that seems like a very tough, nearly impossible challenge that we've set for the organization.

0:05:07.4 AS: I'm curious about how stretch of a challenge should someone be thinking about in this case? I mean, it's one of the hardest things when you start setting goals, is like, are we thinking about 10 years from now? Are we thinking about one year from now? Are we thinking about, come on guys, let's dream big, let's envision what we could be, or are we talking about realistically we think we can get to this point? How do you think about that?

0:05:32.7 JD: Yeah. I like this six month to three-year timeframe for step one, for the challenge or direction, that sort of ultimate goal that you're reaching for. It's not so long that it seems like it's, you know, there's no urgency. It's not five years, it's not 10 years. But it's not so short that it's gonna be impossible to achieve this tough thing. Six months to three years, when you're talking about a significant organizational effort, you gotta be realistic. There's, you gotta have a team working on this. You have to train people, you have to educate people on why this goal is an important goal. And so I think that all of those things take time. Some infrastructure within your organization has to be set up, resources have to be deployed.

0:06:21.5 JD: And so to be realistic but not so far off into the future, I think that six month to the three-year timeframe is a pretty good one. And then step three is to establish your next target condition. So along the way you're setting these intermediate sort of goals that you're working towards along the way ultimately to reach that challenge or direction. So I like the six month to three-year timeframe. And previously when we talked about set the challenge, almost all of our focus was on that quantitative goal. Like, how are we gonna quantify that challenge? And I talked about this chronic absenteeism example. But during this first step, I think it's also really helpful to take a couple sort of sub-steps. And one of them that we talk about in our organization is See the System.

0:07:16.8 JD: Like literally see the system in which we work. And I've found that it's really helpful to have some questions to ask the team that's working on this, questions like on the outset of, so we've set this challenge, we wanna reduce chronic absenteeism from 52% to 5%. Well, what is the largest system to improve when we're working towards that goal? What's the aim of that particular system? What are the opportunities for improvement within that target system? How will the opportunities for improvement be prioritized? Those are sort of four of the questions we ask at the outset of one of these improvement projects, when we're working towards one of these long-term goals. And when we've started asking those questions, at this point in the process, we formed an improvement team.

0:08:15.9 JD: For something like attendance, it's cross-disciplinary, meaning we have a number of people in a number of different roles. We have four school buildings in our school system, so there's representation from all four school buildings. So it's really a cross-functional team that's working through those particular questions. So I think that's really, really important. And then throughout the process, even if folks aren't a member of the team that's meeting on a regular basis, in this case it's a weekly team meeting, there are other people that are going to be important to gather information from; students and families, for example. That's an obvious one. Other staff members that aren't necessarily members of the team that are meeting every week, but that there are ways to gather their input as well.

0:09:04.5 AS: And in this...

0:09:05.5 JD: Oh, sorry, go ahead.

0:09:06.7 AS: In this graphic you show on the left, some people work on the system, some people work in the system, and then you've got your System of Profound Knowledge coach. Is that what you mean by improvement team or are you just highlighting some roles?

0:09:19.3 JD: Yeah. Well, so the improvement team members should be composed of each of those three groups. So in our particular team there's actually two people that have sort of like enough of the knowledge of the System of Profound Knowledge that they could, I'm one of them and then there's another person that also has that knowledge that's working on this project. And then there's a number of people that are working on the system, working in the system in different ways when it comes to this chronic absenteeism, this attendance problem.

0:10:00.3 AS: Okay.

0:10:01.3 JD: And really what we're thinking about during this See the System step in the process is it's really a funneling process. So, even within just the chronic absenteeism, student attendance realm, there's almost unlimited opportunities for improvement and many different areas where we could focus our efforts. And so we're trying to funnel down, focus down to the most vital areas that will have the biggest impact on this chronic absenteeism problem.

0:10:38.5 JD: And we're also really working hard to make sure that people on the team and will be impacted and responsible for implementing whatever this new theory is, this new improvement theory or this new improvement system, they're a part of the team from t