School Reputation and Flaws of Standardized Testing in Education

Dr. Deming was a professor for nearly 5 decades, and while most of his examples and writing discussed manufacturing, he applied all the same ideas to teaching. In this episode, John Dues and host Andrew Stotz discuss points 2 and 3 of Dr. Deming's 14 Points for Management - translated for people in education: adopt the new philosophy and cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. 

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:00.0 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. Today we're continuing our discussion about the shift from management myths to principles for the transformation of school systems. John take it away.

 

0:00:29.4 John Dues: Andrew. It's good to be back. I thought since we've done a number of episodes now just to do a quick recap of where we're at folks that are following along on the Deming Institute website. We're on episode 11. In episodes seven through nine I outlined those six common management myths and you just talked about the point of those three episodes was to help the education systems leaders see what not to do. We've now turned to a set of principles that can be used by these same leaders to guide their transformation work. And in the last episode, episode 10, I introduced the 14 Principles for educational systems transformation. We talked about Principle 1 which was called Create Constancy of Purpose. In this episode I'll describe the second principle which I call Adopt The New Philosophy and the third principle which I call Cease Dependence on Inspection to Achieve Quality. And I mean I think a really important point to make that I got from Dr. Deming when I think about these 14 principles is a preemptive strike. Over the course of 60 years or so of continual improvement work Dr. Deming worked with Japanese industrial leaders, governments, top companies in the United States. Maybe a little bit lesser known was that he was a professor of statistics at New York University for nearly 50 years.

 

0:02:06.1 JD: And in his books he not only taught the 14 Points to the leaders with which he worked but they also guided his own teaching practices as a professor. And so there was a, sort of, a short Deming quote that stuck out in regards to the 14 Points and who they apply to. He said the 14 Points apply anywhere to small organizations as to large ones to the service industry as well to manufacturing. So I think it's sort of a preemptive strike of sorts, in case people in schools would think that maybe these 14 principles only apply to industry or only apply to healthcare and other sector but they really do apply to the education sector and in fact that was, sort of, a sector close to Deming's heart since he spent like I said five decades or so in academia.

 

0:03:00.3 AS: Yeah I mean so it's a good point that I think when you read Deming's material or if you watch his videos there's an overwhelming amount of information about factories and businesses and all that. And there's less about service sector. There is talk in there about service sector. But so I think a lot of people that first stumble upon it start to think, "Oh, this is just for factory quality control", or something like that. And that's been proven wrong particularly the LEAN startup in the world of startups really applied Deming's PDSA cycle as an example in very much service industries so it's a good point that this applies everywhere.

 

0:03:42.3 JD: Yeah. And basically what I tried to do with the 14 Principles in my 'Win-Win' book was just basically just translate the language from, sort of, manufacturing or sort of, industrial language to education sector language. So I actually literally created a crosswalk where I said here's Demings Point 1 and here's how I'd frame that for school people. And so that's, sort of, what I'm taking folks through in this most recent set of episodes. So thinking about diving in here. Principle 2, sort of, the short name is Adopt the New Philosophy. The descriptor, sort of, is Adopt the New Philosophy: Systems leaders must awaken to the fact that education reform movements often lack a sound philosophical foundation, must learn their new responsibilities and take on leadership for improvement. So this, sort of, goes back to this idea of what came out of A Nation At Risk. What was the next steps? What was, sort of, the response? And what I'm saying is that was probably the wrong response and instead we need to Adopt This New Philosophy. That's what Dr. Deming is calling us to do. And that's his point too and I've translated that for education folks.

 

0:05:01.8 AS: And just for clarity purposes. This principle number two and, you know, what Deming's talking about Adopt the New Philosophy is a very kind of a general statement yet it's maybe a specific statement. Is he telling us to adopt this new philosophy, like generally or is he saying the philosophy of such and such, the philosophy of quality, the philosophy of constancy and purpose, the philosophy of being a learning organization? I'm just curious how you're interpreting that.

 

0:05:38.7 JD: Yeah I think the 14 Principles are a part of the philosophy. Really, the philosophy is the System of Profound Knowledge though. And if I could, sort of, frame the Deming Philosophy for education what I would, how I would put that is that it's really about studying and applying the System of Profound Knowledge to do two things basically. The first thing is we wanna view teaching and learning as dynamic processes that occur within a system. That's, sort of, the first frame. The second frame is understand the nature of variation of those teaching and learning processes so that we can take the appropriate action within our systems and then we're doing that so we can accomplish improvement on this continual basis. So that's the, sort of, frame I would give the application of Deming's Philosophy to the education system.

 

0:06:40.9 AS: So is the goal improvement, and understanding the process and understanding variation are steps we get to, of how we improve better, faster, more sustainably or how do you see that?

 

0:06:56.4 JD: Yeah I think that's exactly right. I think it's all of those things. It gives us the information that we need the knowledge that we need within our systems to make the changes that need to be changed on a, sort of, continual basis. And, you know, it's something that never ends. It's a process that really never ends. It's, you know, not a recipe it's not a program to be implemented but instead it's a method it's a way of thinking that allows to, sort of, continually improve our organization.

 

0:07:29.1 AS: One other thing I would just mention about this is that if you take away one thing... One thing we could take away is to become a learning organization. I didn't really understand that for many years, but now I really understand that in order to truly learn you have to understand variation in the System of Profound Knowledge and all of the systems stuff in order to truly learn. And then you start to realize that if you're on a mission to truly learn the amount of improvements that you're gonna be able to do is way beyond most other people most other companies competitors most other schools. Because you have... That is part of the Constancy of Purpose is learning and that, I didn't really understand that when I first got into the Deming stuff but now I see just become a learning machine.

 

0:08:28.3 JD: Yeah. That's what you sort of have to commit to. And I think really what the 14 Principles do is serve as this practical guide by which, you know, systems leaders can lead. It's really that guide. So those management myths avoid those things and then here are these 14 Principles that we can, sort of, follow and some of those principles like Principle 1, Create Constancy of Purpose really tell us what to do and then, sort of, other principles in the list instruct us on how to, sort of, remove barriers in creating this environment the very environment that you were, you know, talking about just now in terms of an environment that's conducive establishing a new philosophy, establishing a learning organization, avoiding barriers to those things like management by objectives. One of the points that we'll get to is "abolish management by objective". That's something we want to get rid of. And really the backbone of the philosophy is transformation from this culture of competition where I win you lose or I lose you win. And really what we want the dominant paradigm in order to, sort of, have the environment that we need to be that learning organization is to create this, sort of, win-win paradigm based on this culture of cooperation.

 

0:10:00.1 JD: I think, you know, especially when Deming was speaking 45 years ago, 50 years ago when he became really popular in the United States, we had a long way to go. And I think there's still a long way to go but you can almost see, well, you can see a lot of the Deming philosophy in companies today. It is just most companies aren't anywhere close to all the way there, right? And that same thing goes for school systems. I think, sort of, that this idea of win-win philosophy it is a new way of thinking for a lot of leaders. I think one of the, sort of, primary concerns which once you've adopted, sort of, this new approach is that we want to develop joy in work and learning among students, for us as staff as well, as a prerequisite to achieving the core purpose of the organization. Because when people are joyful in their work or joyful in their learning you know you've already created this, sort of, environment that you're referring to where people can learn and improve and people are gonna use data in a way that drives towards that instead of, sort of, guarding their corner of the system like we've talked about before. And I think, you know, I think when you read Deming and I think when you think about transformation of an organization from one philosophy to another philosophy that can certainly be daunting.

 

0:11:39.0 JD: I think I've said it on this podcast episode, one of these episodes before but this transition is not gonna happen overnight. And I think Deming said something to the effect of when it comes to transformation there's no instant pudding. This doesn't just happen instantly. I think a more realistic goal is this constant consistent movement towards the new philosophy where you're moving towards total involvement of the entire organization everybody from top to bottom and then you're getting everybody working on this continual improvement activity of all systems processes and activities, you know, within the school system. Now it doesn't mean you're necessarily, sort of, attacking every single system or every process at the same time. It just means that you're sort of equipping everybody across the organization with knowledge of the philosophy, knowledge of the methods, and then the tools that go along with those methods like the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle, like the Process Behavior Chart. And you're getting everybody, sort of, working towards this common aim. And again this is, this is a process and it takes, it takes time for sure.

 

0:12:51.9 AS: And that's why you need Constancy of Purpose too. Because if you don't have Constancy of Purpose and you have constant change, you know, change in leadership and direction, you know, you're never gonna get there. And I think about the...so many companies that we looked at when I was first studying Deming and listening and learning, many of those companies went through a 5 year phase of implementing the Deming teachings and then they got a new CEO and he says I'm not up for that. I like this. I'm, you know, I'm up for measuring everybody's KPIs and kicking ass and holding people accountable around here. Enough of this cooperation. [laughter]

 

0:13:36.1 JD: Yeah I think that's a common occurrence and I think, you know, in addition to the 14 Principles there's also the five... I forget what he exactly called them Deadly sins or something like that.

 

0:13:52.4 AS: Six Deadly Diseases I think it was.

 

0:13:55.0 JD: I think it was started as five and maybe it grew to six or seven but definitely one of them was the transition of senior leaders on a frequent basis because that makes this virtually impossible to, you know, to change to a New Philosophy.

 

0:14:08.5 AS: So that really ties together the Constancy of Purpose and Adopting the New Philosophy because then you really see that this is a real commitment. This isn't a fad, this isn't some new tool or something like that. It's a new way of thinking that's gonna require work to get there.

 

0:14:28.3 JD: Yeah that's exactly right and a lot of people, sort of, associate Deming with Control Charts or something like that, which obviously again he was a statistician. He used Control Charts frequently. I think the Control Charts and Process Behavior Charts are an important tool but what's more important is this way of thinking this is really what Deming was focused on more than anything else is this way of thinking that went with understanding your organization through the lens of the System of Profound Knowledge. It's really this philosophical change adopting this new philosophy that's really what he was most focused on when he worked with governments or schools or corporations, organizations. But that was Principle 2. That's Adopt the New Philosophy. It's not easy. Takes commitment, takes Constancy of Purpose. You've got to stick with it.

 

0:15:21.8 JD: I think Principle 3, sort of, transitioning to that, I talked about ceasing dependence on inspection to achieve quality. And when I'm talking about Principle 3 in education I'm talking about two specific types of inspection. So I'll just, sort of, read the whole principle and then we can, sort of, unpack it a little bit. So Principle 3: "cease dependence on standardized testing to achieve quality and work to abolish grading and the harmful effects of rating people eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis. For example standardized testing by building quality into the product in the first place. The product in education systems is high quality learning." That's, sort of, Principle 3 in a nutshell. There are two, sort of, different concepts to deal with in Principle 3 and this will be probably fairly controversial for a lot of, sort of, educators but those two concepts are...

 

0:16:28.9 AS: Bring it on John.

 

0:16:30.4 JD: Standardized testing and grading. And the prescription is actually different for each of those things if you're following W. Edwards Deming's teachings. And I think that calls to attention an important point with all of this stuff this principle for sure. But all the principles. You really have to do close reading of the 14 Principles because Dr. Deming chose his words very carefully. And I think, you know, when you say, you know, stop over-reliance on standardized testing or abolish grading. A lot of people's initial reactions is probably going to be to scoff or laugh. And I think, you know, I think that's really just a demonstration of how far away they are from the standards that he demanded.

 

0:17:22.3 JD: So a lot of people might hear this and say oh this is fluffy stuff or something like that. He must not want real quality to exist and he was actually saying the exact opposite. So if we start with the standardized testing part, you know, when I think of... Is Deming saying that we should abolish inspection in the form of standardized tests or assessments in general? And I would say no. Of course not. And I think without assessment we are not able to answer the critical question, how are we doing? So assessments in and of themselves are useful I think. But I think we're overly reliant specifically on, sort of, mass inspection style standardized testing like in the form of state testing as the, sort of, key way that we're trying to ensure that there's quality throughout the education system.

 

0:18:26.0 AS: It's interesting because I'm thinking about in the case of a business, inspection is an internal activity that has happened in the past, and our objective is to get rid of that and build quality into the process and the system. But as a business, you're ultimately judged by the quality and you know, value that your product provides. And you'll instantly get the customer feedback by looking at the revenue that you're getting or not getting when you bring that product to market. Whereas in the case of education, what my question to you is, is the signal that we get from business, from the customer. Like, it's just so in your face you go start up a company, you put a million dollars in it, and you don't get any revenue. You think, oh my God, I really messed up. Or you've got a defect in something and it causes a recall and a big cost and, you know, a lot of damage to your reputation. It's just right there in the revenue numbers. But is there a disconnect in that for education? Or is there something that I'm missing in education?

 

0:19:42.8 JD: I don't, I don't think there's a disconnect there. One, every day a student, let's say a 10 year old student goes home and their parent says, how was school today? Do you like your teacher? Those may be a little more qualitative but they're pretty powerful, you know, 'cause you're getting this report back, every single day. In our case in our specific case where I work at United Schools Network in Columbus, we're a public charter network, and so there are no kids that are assigned to us by geographic boundaries. So we have to go out and recruit every student, sort of, in a grassroots way, knock on doors, make calls, send mail, do tours and open houses, those types of things. And so if people aren't satisfied with our school program, they literally walk out the door to another school. They have other schools they can go to. That's pretty powerful as well, that enrollment factor, that would be a little bit different in a traditional public school. But they... People do... When you think about going and buying a house, for example, one of the first things most people do is check out the school system. Or...

 

0:20:54.4 AS: My parents specifically, you know, looked at that when we moved to the town that we moved to in Ohio. And my dad's work was not in Ohio, it was in Detroit and other areas, but he ended up, you know, he was traveling as a salesman, but he ended up choosing, my mom and dad chose that town because of the reputation of that school. And so, yeah.

 

0:21:15.4 JD: Yeah, yeah. And really when you think about Principle 3 too, and specific to standardized testing, it, you know, the way I'm interpreting Deming's Principle 3 and then applying for education - it's not, it's calling for the elimination of the dependence on standardized and other types of tests as the sole measure of quality, not necessarily for their elimination altogether.

 

0:21:42.4 AS: What damage does...I mean, for those, there's a lot of people that may be listening or viewing that think, wait a minute, I mean, standardized testing is what it's all about. I mean, I want everybody in the school system to be tested on the same thing so I can figure out, you know, which one's doing a good job, which one's not, which students, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So just for a moment, if you could just explain why standardized testing, what are the flaws with standardized testing?

 

0:22:07.0 JD: Well... Well a big thing is I think there's a big difference between mass testing as an attempt to provide, you know, sort of the customer or the student or the family with something they won't complain about, and the use of assessments to provide guidance toward improvement of, you know, a learning process. And I think, you know, too often or not, we're focused on the former and not the latter, right? So I think standardized testing, let's say state testing I think can provide some useful data hypothetically, but what often happens is it gets used in all these other ways.

 

0:22:53.8 JD: It's sort of this mass inspection through testing, it's costly. A lot of times, you know, it's unproductive. It basically sort of sorts out sort of good from bad, but doesn't really contribute to progress, right? Just , sort of,year after year low score or the low scoring schools, sort of, score low and the high scoring schools score high, right. I think another thing, another problem with, sort of, mass standardized testing at the population level is that it sort of introduces this idea that there's an acceptable level of defectives, right? Because in most states, there's, sort of,some goal for the percent of students that are gonna be proficient on state tests. In Ohio for grades three through eight, that goal is 80% of the kids will be proficient, and that's acceptable. But then that also means that one in five students, 20% aren't meeting that standard. And that sort of, you sort of lose sight that there's [laughter] this whole bucket of kids over here that you know, you can meet the goal, but you're really leaving behind a whole sort of a significant minority of the students taking the test.

 

0:24:21.9 JD: I think there's also this, sort of,direct contradiction to the philosophy of continual improvement. You know, the Deming philosophy is to build quality into the process in the first place. And that quality doesn't come from this inspection mechanism. You have to go upstream to improve the teaching and learning processes. And I think something like classroom assessments are a much better tool for identifying these upstream processes. And that's kind of a cool analogous to what you were talking about. You know, in businesses where there is inspection that is happening sort of at the local level, and there's not, sort of,like a regulatory or government agency doing that work for a private business.

 

0:25:07.4 AS: It's interesting that you highlight the word dependence and when you talked about it earlier, and if you think about what we're being told by Dr. Deming is to focus, shift our focus from the end of the, or the output of the system to the input and the processes of the system. And I think that that, you know, helps us to frame, it doesn't necessarily mean that we absolutely no longer do any inspection and there's no more testing. But what the important thing is, is we've got to shift our focus to the beginning of the process rather than the end. And I suspect most, you know, senior politicians and government officials are just focused on the end, just get the result. Come on.

 

0:25:52.7 JD: Right. Right Yeah. I think, sort of, to capture this, you know, Deming said, this system of sort of make and inspect, if it's sort of applied to toast, it would be expressed sort of, you burn I'll scrape, right? So that's, we've sort of already burnt the toast, so to say, and we're scraping it by sort of saying, "Oh, well we have the state testing system, that's got how we're gonna improve things." And really alls we're doing is scraping the toast.

 

0:26:21.2 AS: So let's talk...

 

0:26:23.1 JD: Oh, sorry, go ahead.

 

0:26:23.5 AS: I was gonna say, I wanna hear your thoughts on grading next, but good.

 

0:26:28.2 JD: Yeah this is where things...

 

0:26:29.4 AS: You got more on standardized testing, feel free.

 

0:26:29.8 JD: No, no, No. This is a good segue. You know, I think in that turn to grading, it gets a little even more controversial probably because Deming didn't suggest that we merely cease dependence on grades. He said we should abolish them. And again, this is where in, sort of, credibility as a practitioner, those 50 years as a professor, he did this, he did not, he did not issue grades to his students.

 

0:27:00.7 JD: I think it's really worth noting here, this has nothing to do with making things easier for students. It doesn't have anything to do with low-scoring students' self-esteem. Has nothing to do with that. Instead, it's, this idea is based on this more sort of fundamental premise. And this is really key. We want students to experience success and failure on schoolwork as information rather than reward and punishment. And grades themselves are inherently about experience things as reward and punishment. And that really comes... Those ideas come from author and, sort of, social science researcher, Alfie Kohn, who many Deming practitioners and followers would be aware of Alfie's work as it relates to education and parenting and cooperation and competition and those types of things. And I think one of the things that, sort of, pulled me into this way of thinking when... I think it's in this book called Punished by Rewards. He did this... Alfie Kohn did this comprehensive review of the research literature on grades. And it really compared students who got grades to those who didn't. And he found these pretty robust differences. Three of them. So the first one is that kids who are graded tend to become less interested in the topic they're studying. I think that's really important. This includes, actually, the specific topic, as well as the, sort of, subject area more generally, such as math or writing compared you know, to students who got the identical assignment but with no grades involved.

 

0:29:00.1 JD: Second thing is that kids who are graded, when they have a choice to pick, they pick the easiest possible task. Because if the point is to get a high grade, it's only rational to pick the easiest book to read or the easiest assignment to do. So what that tells us is that grades, sort of, inherently lead to kids avoiding intellectual risk taking. That's problematic. And then the final thing, the third thing is that kids who are graded are more likely to think in a superficial or, sort of, shallow fashion. So they're more likely to ask questions like, "Do we have to know this?" as opposed to more thoughtful questions about the content itself. So...

 

0:29:41.7 AS: And just to highlight, is that book called Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning, and What to Do Instead?

 

0:29:50.3 JD: No, this is Alfie Kohn's "Punished by Rewards."

 

0:29:52.9 AS: "Punished by Rewards." Okay, that's another book that he did a forward to. Okay, I see.

 

0:29:57.7 JD: Yeah.

 

0:29:57.9 AS: Okay, "Punished by Rewards." I'm looking for it. And I know everybody could search for that too. So, keep going.

 

0:30:03.5 JD: Yeah. And it's got a longer subtitle about gold stars and things like that. But I think fundamentally, it's this displacement of the, sort of, core priority from learning to the grade that's at a heart, that's at the heart of both Deming and Alfie Kohn's philosophy in this area. I think Deming went as far as to say that the specific losses from grading practices are "unknown and unknowable, but likely catastrophic." [chuckle] So he didn't mince words there. So just sort of recapping that one, it's you know cease dependence on standardized testing to get to quality. And then he is saying abolish grading, because it does so much to put kids on the path to, sort of, gaming the system, shifting the focus from the learning itself to trying to get the reward that comes with a high grade or this thing or that thing that's handed out as a reward for high grades.

 

0:31:15.0 AS: Got it. "Punished by Rewards."

 

0:31:16.6 JD: "Punished by Rewards."

 

0:31:16.7 AS: It's the 25th edition that's come out, "The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes."

 

[laughter]

 

0:31:24.0 JD: Yep, that's the one. That's the one. It's a heavy read. It's worthwhile. It's a good read. It's... Yeah.

 

0:31:30.2 AS: It comes as an audio book too, so that could be, read by the author. So, interesting one.

 

0:31:35.3 JD: Absolutely.

 

0:31:35.8 AS: I'm gonna check that out. All right.

 

0:31:37.3 JD: That's a good one. It's a commitment.

 

0:31:40.1 AS: So how do we wrap this up?

 

0:31:43.2 JD: Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I think again, I think a key thing to, sort of, understand is, sort of, we're studying these 14 Principles, one or two at a time. But anybody listening to this, I think it's really important not to lose sight that these things are mutually supportive. It's a System of Principles, and you have to have all 14 connected together in addition to the System of Profound Knowledge. That's why this gets so hard. You have to understand all of this. And you can't just put it together like a recipe or, you know, pick this one. I can get behind ceasing dependence on standardized testing, but I can't get behind abolishing grading, right? You can't do it like that. You can't disconnect these things. They're all sort of tied back to the underlying philosophy.

 

0:32:38.3 JD: So I think that's a really important thing. And, you know, because it's not a program or, you know, a project to be implemented, it really requires a, sort of, neverending commitment to both learning and quality. But it is discontinuous. You don't have to do everything at once. You can't do everything at once. Instead, what this allows you to do when you start to understand some of the methods is you start to understand, okay, what is our system capable of on any number of fronts? And then we can set more realistic goals together to, sort of, step towards improvement, real quality. So that's, sort of, what I would take from this entire distillation of the 14 Principles.

 

0:33:27.2 AS: And I would wrap up by saying, you know, there's a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that most people don't see. [laughter] There's... We see what's in front of us, but the truth is, by starting to adopt the principles, what's happening is you're just trying to make a transformation. And part of that transformation is that you're seeing the opportunities in the world that you didn't see in the past. And conventional thinking, what we've been taught in the past has given us our perspective. But when you start to remove the blinders and say, "what would happen if we remove grading? What would happen if we ceased dependence on standardized tests?" And we said, "We are gonna look at other ways of doing this."

 

0:34:09.6 AS: What would happen if we really started to adopt this philosophy and the System of Profound Knowledge to really set a long-term direction? What you are gonna find is so much unfolds. And so today's discussion, just to kind of wrap up, adopting, Principle 2, adopting the new philosophy, talking about the teaching process, understanding variation with the ultimate goal of improving, and improving the outcome for students. And ultimately that's a transformation that your organization can go through. The other one is Principle 3, which is ceasing dependence on inspection to achieve quality.

 

0:34:51.2 AS: And you really focused in on: hey, standardized tests and grading, which I think is a challenge for everybody to think about. If you are saying that so strongly, and Deming was saying that also there's gotta be something there, right? And ultimately, as you said, the product of education is high quality learning and, it doesn't say, completely get rid of any kind of tests or any kind of assessment. But I think that what you are also trying to get us to do is look at the beginning of the process and then use feedback that we are getting through tests and assessments to go back and improve the beginning of the process. And ultimately, I think, I would end my summary of what you said with, of this discussion with what you said about, that you want students to experience success and failure as information, not reward and punishment. Anything you would add to that summary?

 

0:35:49.0 JD: Yeah, the only thing I would say is, a disclaimer. I certainly have not figured this all out, and I work in a system and we have not abolished grading, for example. Because you, another thing you have to do is you have to design a replacement that has to be a part of the process. So in the book, I suggest some questions. I don't suggest necessarily an alternative system. I haven't got to that point with grading, but I have a series of questions people can ask to start to think about what their grading policy is. So it's a process, I'm not, I definitely don't have it all figured out. I'm still working on it.

 

0:36:26.4 AS: Yeah. And, I'll just wrap up that last bit right there and say that if you were in your own environment where you weren't under government regulation or you weren't required to do this or that, you don't have to have a replacement. So for instance, in my case, in my coffee business, we just heard so much negative about the performance appraisal system that eventually we just, like, we are gonna stop and people ask, "well, what are we gonna do instead?" And I said, "I don't care what we are gonna do instead." This is, we've already evaluated that this is bad. Everybody's saying it, we know it, we've learned that, we've seen it internally. So our first job is to stop what is not working. Now, it would be a dream if I could replace it with something amazing that is working, but wouldn't we all already have that? So sometimes we are caught into this system that this thinking that we have to have a substitute or new way. And that's not always the case. But when you are under a lot of constraints, then, you are kind of forced to that. So I just wanted to open people's minds to that. And, anything you would add to that before I close?

 

0:37:38.4 JD: No, that's really interesting. I... I'd love to hear more about how that's gone since you guys did that.

 

0:37:44.1 AS: Yeah, it's okay. We never really done a replacement. We did it a long time ago and we never really...

 

[overlapping conversation]

 

0:37:48.6 JD: That's cool.

 

0:37:49.5 AS: So our, I mean our replacement is feedback, coaching, sitting down, having meetings and, but we don't, and when it comes to compensation, we came to some, different conclusions that we wouldn't compensate people for their individual performance. The compensation would be related to the performance of the company with a very clear system of how the success of the company comes up in additional profit and how that's allocated to each person based upon, first their salary. So there's a market component, the market rate component, then based upon their years of service, which we want to reward, and then based on a fixed amount so that people who aren't making the biggest salaries in the place still always get something, that's meaningful to them. So there's lots of alternatives and, let's keep thinking about it. And that's, I think what you bring to the whole Deming sphere is to start thinking about that in education.

 

0:38:48.6 AS: So John, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for this discussion. For listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. Also, you can find John's book Win-Win, Dr. W Edward Deming, the system of Profound Knowledge and the Science of Improving Schools on Amazon. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming. "People are entitled to joy in work" and that counts in education.