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 were two-day ones at Quality Enhancement Seminars in, what was it, George Washington, I think. But the point that I remember, as just a young guy who I was, I pretty much admired all these business leaders. And then to see Dr. Deming really nail em to the wall and say it's about you changing. And whether he was saying that directly or whether that he was implying that through the Red Bead experiment or other things, it's about you shaping the system. That really blew me away because I had already read some books and I was pretty excited. And then it also made me think about, let's say there's a really good book, I would say Good to Great by Jim Collins that highlights some things that you can do to succeed and make your business better. And you can just buy that book and hand it to your management team and go, hey, implement what you learned from this book.   0:11:20.8 Andrew Stotz: Whereas with the Deming book, it's like there's just so much more to it. So I guess the answer to this is it is more takes time. There's more thinking going on. And I think that's part of the whole point of what your book does, is to help us map it out. So why don't we go through and think about this and kind of maybe step by step through what is the starting point and how do we go?   0:11:45.4 Cliff Norman: Andrew, I just got to add to what you just said there and go back to Joe Balthazar at Hallmark Building Supplies. He shared with me that, and he's the one that said I want you to do these four year seminars dedicated Deming's idea of Profound knowledge. And he said, Cliff, the day I made it, I knew I'd made it. Is my son Joey spilled his milk. He's about three years old. And he said, I started to do my normal leap across the table and he said I was about mid air. And I thought, oh my, this is what they do. This is part of their system. This is common. And I'm treating this like it's special. And that was so profound for him. And when, when you move beyond the Shewhart chart and you see events in your life around you relative to the theory of variation, common and special cause variation at a deep way like that, that's the kind of transformation you want to see in a leader. And Joe will tell you he's forever grateful for Deming and everything he's learned, and I think that's the reward. But people need to be willing to go on that journey, as Dave was saying.   0:12:53.0 Andrew Stotz: So Dave, why don't you walk us through a little bit of what you guys are teaching in that chapter.   0:13:00.3 Dave Williams: Sure. Well, one of the next steps obviously is if somebody, if a leadership team thinks that they want to go on this journey, there's some considerations they got to think about. As we've already sort of alluded to or touched on, this is a leadership responsibility and a leadership change. And so there's got to be will amongst the leadership team in order to say we want to work together and work hard to do this work. That this is not something that, similar to Cliff's example of say, having black belts, that we can just hand it off, somebody else will do it, and we can just keep going about our business and hope. It's important that leaders spend time recognizing and thinking about the fact that this is going to involve them doing work, doing effort, changing the way that they think, changing the way that they practice. And I like to say it's good hard work. I mean it's going to be something that's deeply rewarding. But it does require them to have that will. And with will then it's going to come time and energy, right? They've got to make the space, they've got to create regular routines and opportunities for them to learn just in terms of content, learn in terms of practice or application and learn in the process of doing the improvement work and doing the change to the way that they work in the organization.   0:14:38.0 Dave Williams: So there's going to be a need to build in that ability. And then a third thing is to ask whether you think this is something that you can do on your own or whether it might be useful to have help. And help may be an internal, a consultant, but likely not to promote consulting it but, but there's a good chance that you're going to need somebody that has both experience in improvement and helping people do results-driven improvement as well as somebody who has experience doing system wide change through a lens like QOS. And, and the advantage of that often is it it gives you as a leadership team to focus in on your job of thinking and looking and learning and allow somebody else to be an external intervener, somebody who comes in and creates some of the support, some of the context, some of the ways that can make it easier for you to step back and look at your organization in a different way. And so many times those are some of the things that should be considered as teams working through it. Cliff, what would you add or improve upon.   0:16:07.3 Cliff Norman: The idea of external help. Deming was pretty black and white about that. I was kind of surprised. I went back and read one of his quotes. He said, "I should mention also the costly fallacy held by many people in management that a consultant must know all about a process in order to work on it. All evidence is exactly the contrary. Competent men in every position, from top management to the humblest worker know all there is to know about their work except how to improve it. Help towards improvement can come only from outside knowledge." And I was reflecting on that today with Jane who's been involved in this for 40 plus years also. I said Jane, when he said that, I think it was accurate because at that time she and I were going to Duran seminars. There's only two books out there with methods. One was Ishikawa's book on Guide to Quality Control. And the other was Feigenbaum's book. And then of course you had Duran's book on The Quality Handbook, which was a nice doorstop. But there wasn't that much knowledge about improvement. And the worst part where Deming was really getting to was there's very few people you'd run into that actually under the Shewhart methods and charts and understand the difference between special and common cause variation.   0:17:27.0 Cliff Norman: And so you had to bring that kind of knowledge in from the outside. And frankly, we've had people go off the rails here. You know, Dr. Deming in the teaching of statistics has identified analytic studies which is focused on looking at data over time and trying to understand that and simple methods and approaches and then what he calls enumerative statistics, which is use of T tests, F tests and all the rest of it, which assumes that under the IDD principle that data is independent and identically distributed. Well, if you have any special causes in the data set, it blows up both of those assumptions and the use of those methods doesn't offer any help in prediction. And as Dr. Deming often said, prediction is the problem. And then go back to Shewhart. And Shewhart said, things in nature are inherently stable, but man-made processes are inherently unstable. So when Dave and I first do a Shewhart chart for a client, we don't expect for it to be stable. We expect for to have special causes. And as Dr. Deming said and also Dr. Juran, that when you get a stable system, that in and of itself is an achievement, that means nobody's messing around with the system anymore.   0:18:43.0 Cliff Norman: And you see this in the simplest things, like in an office, somebody will walk in and they think that their body is the standard for what the internal temperature should be for that room. So then they walk up and they start tampering with the thermostat. And by the end of the day everybody's irritated because we've had so many bodies up there with their standard. Moving the funnel on us here, and just leaving it alone would probably all be better off. But you have to learn that. And I think that's what Dr. Deming was saying, is that that kind of knowledge is going to come from the outside. Now the good news is is that since he wrote that in 1986, we've got a lot of people out there and some of them are in organizations that do understand the Shewhart methods and can understand the difference between common and special cause variation. They do understand the difference between a new and analytic studies and statistics and they can be of help. So the Deming Institute has a room full of these people show up, but they're at their gatherings annually. So we're a lot further along than we were in 1986.   0:19:45.2 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. So let's go through that for just a second. Some considerations you've talked about. You know that it's a leadership change. Right. And you gotta ask yourself, are we ready to work on this? And you know, this is not a hands-off thing. The second thing you talked about is time and energy. Are we ready to make the space for this? We have to have regular meetings. You know, we've gotta really... There's some work involved here. And then the third part you've talked about is outside help. And you mentioned about this story of Joe Balthazar and how he asked you to do the same topic over and over for four years. And imagine if he was telling his team, let's meet and try to implement some of this stuff on our own. Everybody dig into a book and then let's try. It would be very difficult to make that kind of progress compared to bringing an outside person. Which also brings me to the last thing that you said, Cliff, which was the idea that Dr. Deming had mentioned, that you need an outside person to truly change something. Everybody's got the expertise on the inside.   0:20:44.5 Cliff Norman: I appreciate you summarizing that because my job and working with Joe and leadership team, I was meeting with him every month. But what the four years that Jane and I spent were the next levels of his leadership. You know, it wasn't the leadership team. And I'm glad you brought that up because it was the very next level that he wanted exposed to this and the VP of sales that came in, he was new, so he had to be part of this group because he wasn't there originally. And so there was that ongoing... He wanted that next generation that was going to take over for him and the others to really understand this. So I'm glad you summarized that for me to help.   0:21:30.5 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And I think one of the starting points too, I mean, the body of work, not just this book, but the other books that you guys have been involved in and produced provide a lot of the starting points for this. So there's a lot there. Dave, where do we go after these considerations? And the people say, okay, yeah, leadership says, we want to make this change. We're ready to make some time for it. We're willing to get outside support and help. Where do we go next.   0:21:57.7 Dave Williams: Right. Well, one thing that we typically invite a leadership team to do is to take kind of a self assessment of where they sort of see their baseline in relation to the methods and activities of QOS. So in chapter one of the book, there's actually a table that is 10 different categories. And then each leader takes it independently and they rate their level of agreement with different definitions from 0 to 10. 0 being this really isn't present, and 10 is, I'm very, very far along on this journey that in the book that's out now, there's a summarized table, it's on a page. But actually in the QOS field guide that we're working on publishing this year, there's a much more detailed version that we use in practice that has deeper definitions, but basically it works its way through purpose and leadership and systems thinking and measurement and all the things that are tied into QOS and what... And as I mentioned, we have each individual member of the leadership team take it independently and then we bring those scores together to learn together.   0:23:32.5 Dave Williams: And there's different ways in which you can display it. In the book, we show an example of a leadership team's scatter plot where it shows the rating and then it also shows the standard deviation amongst that exists between the leadership team. It's very, very common for leaders to not be in agreement in terms of their score in each of the different areas. You know what I said, It's a 0 to 10 scale. Typically, in my experience using the tool, people tend to be between a 2 and a 6 and hovering around a 2 or a 4. But it sort of looks like a buckshot or shotgun blast where there's a very... If you were to put dots where everybody scores, where there's variation that exists. And that's good because it's useful for the team to pause and think about why they assess the organization the way that they did. Looking at it through this new lens, where are the places that there's agreement and also where are the places that there's variation? And that helps them to be able to think about the fact that through this process, they're likely to both improve their assessment of the organization, but also increase their agreement about where they are and what they need to do to move forward and what they need to do to improve.   0:25:05.2 Dave Williams: And so that's a useful starting point, gets everybody kind of on the same page, and it's something that we can use at intervals as one of the ways to continually come back and evaluate progress towards the destination of pursuing quality as an organizational strategy.   0:25:23.7 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, I mean, I imagine that self assessment, it helps you too when you work with companies to be able to really understand, okay, here are starting point with this company is really, they just really don't know much about all of this stuff, whereas you'll have some other clients that basically, wow, okay, there's a lot of knowledge here about it, but how's the implementation and all that? So are we ready to change? Are we prepared to devote the time and energy? Are we going to get outside help? And where are we now? What's our starting point that's great to help us understand exactly how you step through it. What comes next?   0:26:03.5 Cliff Norman: Well, in that very first milestone, in that table, is it table three, Dave? Anyway, the very first milestone is to establish formal improvement efforts. And the reason for that is that unless people experience what it takes to develop, test and implement changes in the organizations, they really can't appreciate the structure that comes with quality as an organizational strategy. Because it's very difficult for many organizations to launch three or four improvement efforts and then bring them to fruition. And there's all sorts of stuff that happens. And then you find out very quickly whether you have managers or leaders, and organizations they've brought me in, they say, let's do some leadership training. I said, no, let's just do some improvement and then we'll find out if we have leaders or not. And one group, I won't mention who it was, but they had five people on their leadership team and they had to replace two of them because they found out they couldn't actually manage an improvement effort. And then the CEO was wondering how they actually manage their organization, which they weren't either. And so it's a rather, it's an important test in the front.   0:27:22.2 Cliff Norman: But as Dr. Juran says, it's real important to develop the habit of improvement. And if you don't know what that is, if you've never experienced it, then it's hard to say to people, gee, I need a purpose that aligns my improvement efforts. I need to understand my system so I know where those improvements are going on. I need to build an information system, get information from customers outside, people inside. I need to put together a strategic plan that actually makes improvements on purpose. That's a lot of work. And once you understand how complicated it can get in terms of just doing three or four improvement efforts and then all of a sudden you got a portfolio of 30 to do your strategic plan. Now that needs some structure, that needs some guidance and all the rest of it. But I'll just go back one step further. My own journey. I was sent by Halliburton at Otis Engineering to go see Dr. Deming 1982 in February. And coming back, I had an audience with the president of our organization, Purvis Thrash. And I went on and on about Dr. Deming. He said, Cliff, you know what I'd like to have? I said, what's up, Mr. Thrash?   0:28:27.5 Cliff Norman: He says, if you'll take this 50 million dollar raw material problem and solve this for me, I'll be a happy man and I'll give you all the quality you want. But go take care of that problem for me first and then come back to me and talk about Deming and Juran and anything else you want to talk about. So I put together four or five people and over about three months we solved his 50 million dollar raw material problem. And then he had a meeting of all executives and I was sitting with the managers in the back row and he called me to the front and he says, Cliff, will you sign this card right here? And I says, well Mr. Thrash, what is this? He says, well, I'm giving you authority to sign $50,000 anytime you need it to get all the quality we can stand here at Otis Engineering. One of the vice presidents said, well, I don't have that authority. He said, you didn't save me $50 million. You know, but once that happens, Andrew, once you do that, then you've got people that are willing to help you. And then once that takes place, I can't tell you how important, it allowed me then to bring in Lloyd Provost to help me.   0:29:36.2 Cliff Norman: And they weren't about to pay out money. They didn't like consultants, in fact, they were anti-consultant. But you saved us $50 million. I gave you $50,000. And Lloyd doesn't make that much. So get him in here, do whatever you need to go do. And I just think it's so critical that we have that demonstration project that people understand at the leadership level what we're talking about when we talk about design and redesign of the system.   0:30:00.0 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. I mean, I appreciate in the book you're talking about this concept. I'm not going to call it quick wins, but the idea is we need to get results. You know, this isn't just about talking about stuff so that's one thing that as you just illustrated, that's one point. The second thing you mentioned, is this person a leader or a manager? You know, and I think for the listeners or viewers out there, they're probably... When they heard you say that, they're probably thinking. Okay, wait a minute. Are my team managers or leaders? How do I know? What would you say? What differentiates the two?   0:30:37.2 Cliff Norman: I was fortunate to hang around Dr. Maccabee, as Deming did, and I asked Dr. Maccabee that question. He said, Cliff it's actually pretty easy. He said leaders have followers, and if you have followers, you can be anywhere in the organization, be a leader, but if you don't have followers, you're not a leader. You might be a manager with authority. You're not a leader.   0:31:02.7 Andrew Stotz: Can I ask a little bit more on that? So I'm thinking about my own business, which is a coffee factory, and I have people that are running the business, but I also have people that are running departments like the roasting department. And that area when they're overseeing this and they're doing a very good job and they're keeping things up and all that. How do I understand in a sense you could say, are they followers? Well, not really. They're people working for them and they have a good time and so do I view that person as not necessarily a leader, but more of a manager, or how do I look at it in my own company?   0:31:35.5 Cliff Norman: It could be a manager, which is essential to the organization. And that's another big difference. You see, the leader can't delegate their relationship with the people who are followers. You can't do that any more than a teacher can dedicate her class to a substitute teacher. Anybody that's ever watched that knows that chaos is getting ready to break out here because that teacher has a relationship with those students. She knows them all in a big way. And when the substitute comes in is game time in most classrooms and so forth, the managers have skills and things that they're applying and they can actually delegate those. Like when I was a foreman, I could have somebody come in and take over my department and I say assign all my people tomorrow. And they could do that. Now, in terms of the people that I was leading that saw me as a leader in that department, they didn't have that relationship.   0:32:30.2 Cliff Norman: But management or skills and necessary things to make the organization run like you're talking about, the coffee is not going to get out the door unless I have people with subject matter knowledge and competent managers to make sure that the T's are getting crossed, the I's dotted and the rest of it. But the leadership of the organization that has followers, that's a whole different person. And I think it's important. That could be anywhere in the organization. Like I had at Halliburton, I had a VP of engineering. Everybody went to him, everybody. He had 110 patents. You know, he built that system. He built the whole organization. So the CEO did not have the followers that the VP of engineering had. And it was well earned. It's always earned, too.   0:33:16.7 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. Okay, that's great. Leaders have followers. Leaders cannot delegate their authority. They have a different relationship.   0:33:24.0 Cliff Norman: They can't delegate the relationship.   0:33:25.8 Andrew Stotz: The relationship. Okay.   0:33:27.4 Cliff Norman: Yeah. Very important.   0:33:34.3 Andrew Stotz: So now let's go back to what, where we were. So we were saying some of the considerations. Are we ready to change? Are we prepared to devote the time and energy? Are we ready to get outside help and where are we now? And that self assessment that you talked about helps us to understand what's our starting point. I always tell a joke with my students about this when I talk about. I'd say, imagine you go to London and you're going to go visit your friend and you call your friend up, you say, I've arrived and I'm calling from a phone booth and just tell me how to get there. And the friend says, well, where are you? And you say, I'm not really sure. Well, do you see anything around you? Yeah, well, there's lots of buildings, but I don't really, you know. Well, do you see any names of any streets? No, I don't really see anything. But just tell me how to get there. There's something missing. If we don't know where we are, it's very difficult to get to where we're going. So now we understand where we are. We got that scatter plot that you guys have that you've talked about. Dave, where do we go next?   0:34:26.6 Dave Williams: Well, so Cliff already mentioned one of the fundamentals. And sometimes I think this is something that people struggle with because they want to jump into something new. But one of the best starting points is to focus in on improvement. And there's a number of different reasons for that. So one is that I don't know about you all, but in my experience, if I ask people, like, hey, I want to create some improvement projects and get started on improvement, I always tell people, like, if you remember the old Stephen Covey exercise where he put the rocks and the stones and the sand into a jar and poured water. And like you would do it in different orders. And I'm fascinated that people will stare at the big rocks or the things that are right in front of them, or the things that are on their agenda, or the things that are part of their strategy. And then they'll look to the side and grab some rare event or some extra thing that isn't related to that, but they've always wanted to work on. And where we try to focus people's attention is one, what are you already working on? Can you look through your and ask around, what are the things that are currently in play, projects that exist? And sometimes we won't ask, what improvement projects do you have? Because if you do that, you get a short list.   0:35:51.4 Dave Williams: Those are the things that people defined as an improvement effort, or maybe use some kind of framing to decide it was an improvement project. It may be better to in the beginning of the book, in the first chapter, we talk about different ways that you improve. And there's designing and redesigning a process. There's designing and redesigning a service or a product. There's changing a whole system. And so it can be useful to say, well, what are we doing in these areas? And that may actually create a bigger list of the various things where people are working on something that's about change to the system that may lend itself to be better activated through firing it up as an improvement project. And then, of course, there's a good chance that any organization, especially if they've done some kind of strategic planning, have some strategic objectives or some strategic priorities which they've committed to or already said, these are the things we're going to work on. So kind of crowdsourcing or bringing those together helps us to potentially find the early portfolio of projects without having to look much further, without having to say, what else do you want to work on.   0:37:07.0 Dave Williams: And then if we've got that, if we've got that list, a second thing that we can do is invite people to use the three questions of the model for improvement and reflect on can you answer these three questions? Do you know what you're trying to accomplish? Do you know how a change will result in improvement? Do you know what changes you'll make? What's your theory about how you'll get to improvement? And so having a list of the things that are already present or existing may be one first step. Another second step in the firing up a portfolio of improvement projects is asking the three questions for the model for improvement. And then a third one, if it's an active project is we have a project progress scale that you might use that can help you gauge. So I've got a project where is it on its journey towards achieving its aim or getting results? Those three can help us to sort of get a sense of the work that is at hand and that has already been sort of started in some fashion that is already in progress and maybe to get a sense of the level of definition and the progress that exists.   0:38:22.3 Dave Williams: They may not be the right projects, but that's a good place to start before trying to create new ones. And I'll hand it to you, Andrew.   0:38:30.4 Andrew Stotz: I find that interesting. Both the story that you told Cliff about fix my raw material problem and then, Dave, what you're talking about is as you talk in the book, focus first on improvement. What are we already working on? What's an improvement project we've got? What's a problem we've got? Because a lot of times, let's say in the teachings of Dr. Deming, it's like, no, get your mind right, read this stuff, read this, figure this out, think about this, go to a seminar, talk to other people before you do anything. I feel like that is oftentimes where people get caught is they get caught up in, I need a year to think about this. And can you explain a little bit more about why once we've done our self assessment and we're ready to go, that you focus on improvement rather than the thinking process?   0:39:21.7 Dave Williams: Well, because we want to... Well, one, we know that in order to get results or to get a different result than what we want, we got to change the system that we got. Right. So in order to do that, we've got to do improvement. The other thing is that there's already energy that's being expended here.   0:39:41.4 Andrew Stotz: That's a good point.   0:39:42.7 Dave Williams: The risk that often I find people run into is that they then add other projects that are not strategic into that bucket and take up more energy. I'll tell you an example. I was working with the health system here in the States and we crowdsource just the things that they were calling improvement projects. The health system had 25 active teams that were just the ones that were called out as improvement projects. When we looked at those 25 teams, the vast majority of them were not actually... They had been meeting for months and doing things for quite some time, but they actually weren't doing any changes and, or they've been testing changes for quite some time. So, now just this exercise alone by only asking, what improvement projects do you have? You realize you've got 25 teams that have been resourced or are spending energy or going to meetings or focused on something. They may not be the strategic thing that matters, but that's irrelevant right now. We just know that we already have invested some interest here. The second thing is these folks have been on this journey for quite some time and are not making progress.   0:41:01.7 Dave Williams: So that tells me something about maybe the way that they framed it. Did they charter it well? Did they have the right people in the room or the right team? Did they have the right tools and methods to be able to break down the problem and then figure out what to test and learn? So there may be some difficulty...   0:41:19.4 Andrew Stotz: Or did they even just dissipate their efforts across 25 projects too? Right in their resources, yeah.   0:41:26.1 Dave Williams: Yeah. Or there are overlaps? So there's a number of different factors. There's actually a paper that was published by a health system in the United Kingdom, and it was really interesting. They spent a lot of attention on generating will through training and getting people in the classroom and teaching them about improvement methods. And they fired up all this energy. They had a massive explosion of the number of projects that were started or where somebody went into their software. They had a software platform. Anybody could go and start a project. Well, something like 50% of those projects never actually got to PDSA testing where they changed anything. And then there were a slew of them that were stuck in PDSA testing but never saw any movement in their process measures or their outcome measures. And only a small number actually progressed in achieving their aim. And I asked the Chief Quality Officer about this, and and he admittedly said that it was very exciting that we we're generating will and getting things going, but that alone was only getting them to maybe some early design and some thinking, but they weren't getting them to results.                                                                         0:42:34.8 Dave Williams: And I said, well, what about the ones that were getting results? And he said, well, those are actually ones where we've got an improvement advisor who's got some skills and ability and improvement. There are things that are resourced, there are things that were prioritized. And man, when we did all those things, they moved from planning and organizing and thinking to testing changes and moving in a direction of goodness and getting at least results in their process measures, if not their outcome measures. And so in my mind, I was like, I appreciate you're trying to build this sort of culture, but it felt like a lot of burnt energy at the front end with all these teams getting into training and firing up their software and more energy might have been strategic in copying what was getting to results. And I think that's part of what we're trying to get to, is helping people learn. You've got if you don't have a method to figure out strategic projects, let's look at the ones you got. How are they going? Where are people at? And how effective is the capability that you have within your system right now? And the leaders want to be part of that, and they can learn within that to go, oh, wow, this is our current state.   0:43:47.2 Dave Williams: And so maybe we're going to agree to continue on with these projects. Maybe we're going to sunset some of them, but we're going to learn together about how do we get better at getting better, and how do we learn how to move projects forward and not to have them take two years. Let's try to get them down to four or six months, whether that's through scope or execution. But let's get better at getting better. And then as we're building... Developing the early activities of QOS, we'll eventually get to a point where we'll also be able to identify more strategic projects that are going to move us towards our aim or towards our purpose better. And this will help us as we're trying to build the capability to get there.   0:44:32.7 Cliff Norman: You know, Andrew, early on, when Dave went down this path, he said that we got to make sure that somebody's working on improvement. They're actually making changes. And Jane and I were working with a group, and the CEO said they've been meeting a long time. Could you down there and see what they're doing? Because nothing's happening. And we started looking through their agendas and they had everything well documented, and it was all about getting ready to get ready. And then they'd assign the dessert. Who's going to bring the dessert to the next meeting. And Jane looked at him and says this reminds me of something, Cliff. I said, what's that? Can I share my screen?   0:45:10.9 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. Yep, go ahead.   0:45:13.7 Cliff Norman: I may send this to. You may know about it, but this is Dr. Deming's Diary of a Cat. And everyday...   0:45:20.6 Andrew Stotz: It hasn't come up yet. Hold on one second. Hopefully you've got permission now.   0:45:28.6 Cliff Norman: Let me go back and check here.   0:45:33.9 Andrew Stotz: Okay. It looks like it's coming up. One second.   0:45:38.4 Cliff Norman: It said every day is today. There's no theory days of the week. But today I got up some food in a bowl, it was great. Slept some too. Play with yarn, got some food in a bowl, had a good nap, slept, food, yarn, fun. Play with a shoelace. There's a big change right there. Went from yarn to a shoelace. Some people call that a job shop. And ate, slept, had a good day, slept, ate some food, yarn, so forth. So, and the team meeting looked just like that. But there's really no changes going on relative to improvement. So Dr. Deming would often share this into four days seminar to make sure that we weren't involved in the Diary of the Cat, but we were actually doing something useful in terms of making changes in the organization.   0:46:24.4 Andrew Stotz: That's a great one. And it helps us to understand that we could be busy all day long and not improve anything.   0:46:31.8 Cliff Norman: You know, or actually confuse that with improvement. In fact, we have an operational API that my team, we were embarrassed in our first, wait a second, our first improvement guide we wrote. And Dr. Adamir Pente, who's a professor at the university in Brazil, he sent us a note and he said, I know you guys and he said you're real big on operational definitions, but you've written this book on improvement and nowhere have you, you've defined what you mean by improvement. And then he put together a three part definition that there's a design and redesign system, there's system measures and the change is sustainable and lasting and so we put that definition in the second edition. But I was confronted at a university, I won't mention which one it was, but they had 30 Keystone projects for a advanced degree program for nursing and they were convinced they were doing improvement. And when I had them apply that definition, they came up out of the thirty. They only could find two projects out of the 30 where they were actually designing and redesigning the system, which, that's the first thing Dave said are we designing and redesigning and making real changes? And people think just showing up and going through motions and all the rest of it is improvement. No, it means...   0:48:07.8 Dave Williams: Looks like we've lost...   0:48:11.9 Andrew Stotz: We lost you at the last, the last statement you just made. People are going through all this stuff and thinking that they're improving, but they're...   0:48:22.8 Cliff Norman: Yeah, it's showing up and going through motions and you know, having the meetings and making sure we assign who's bringing dessert. But we're not really designing and changing the system. We're not getting measurable changes of improvement. In other words, we haven't tracked the data over time and we can't say that the changes that we've made are going to in fact be sustainable because we haven't known what we've done to the system to deserve a sustainable change.   0:48:51.4 Andrew Stotz: By the way, what a buzzword these days, sustainability, sustainable and all that. And you just think do people really think about how we're building something that's really lasting and sustainable?   0:49:04.8 Cliff Norman: Well, we have a checklist and actually Jane designed it for the first edition and it literally lays out what changes did you make, which processes did you change, what's going to change in the documentation, whose role statements have been changed in the organization because of this change. And once all that's answered on that checklist, which is in the book, then we can... But we're pretty certain that we've created the structure to make it easy for people to do the right thing and hard to do the wrong thing. But unless that structure's changed, probably not much going to happen.   0:49:40.8 Andrew Stotz: Just for the sake of time, because I think we want to wrap up in just a bit. But there's so many stuff, so much stuff that we've been through. But I know there's even more in this chapter, but how would you start to bring this together for the person who is a leader, himself or herself, and they're listening to this and they're thinking, okay, I'm ready to make a change and I'm prepared to devote the time and energy because I see the outcome and I'm open to help, whether that's through the book and other books, whether that's through a consultant, whatever that is. And I can even do a self assessment to some extent and know where our level is, which is very low. We don't know much about this type of stuff and that type of thing. We talked about the first focus on improvement. How do they pull this all together and start moving on it?   0:50:35.0 Dave Williams: There's three things that follow the self assessment. The first one is this focus on doing improvement work and setting up a portfolio of projects. And we just kind of talked about many of the different methods that go into that. And like I said, sometimes that when you say that out loud, leaders don't initially get excited by it because they think they have it. But actually it's a powerful opportunity for you to learn about what's currently going on in the organization and about where this opportunity is to reduce a lot of the noise and a lot of the friction that's getting in the way from you getting to results. The second thing that often happens in parallel is that the leaders need to build a learning system where they're going to be able to learn together both about these projects and what these projects are telling them about their organization, about their culture, about their people, and about their capacity to get results, but also that they can start to be learning about the science of improvement and profound knowledge and the activities of QOS that are going to be part of what they're going to work on developing over the course of the first year or two.   0:51:50.6 Dave Williams: And so that typically is, that's making that space and energy. It's a blend of book learning and application and practical. Trying and looking at things within the organization. It's a very applied approach, but it's an ongoing piece of their discovery. And I often argue that this is a real opportunity for leadership because they're going to be able to see their organization in a way that they haven't seen it before. And when we talk about profound knowledge, they're going to gain this profound understanding and expertise about what they're charged with and what they own and what they want to change in a way that they haven't been able to have it before. And so it's a hard work, but rewarding work. And then third is that typically where the, where we invite people to start is to focus in on the first activity, which is to develop or establish or develop their purpose. When this work was initially framed, not everybody was as... Not everybody had a mission, vision and value statement or a purpose statement that wasn't as common, but today people do. But the difference here, and you'll see this in the chapter on purpose, is that organizations that are pursuing quality as an organizational strategy are organizations that are systems that are built to constantly be trying to match a need that exists out in the world.   0:53:34.7 Dave Williams: And so often a learning for people is to step back and have to reflect on, well, what is the need in which we are creating these products and services to match? And if we're creating these things to match the need, how do we understand what's important, what are the quality characteristics that matter? And then how do we define what our mission is in that context? And being able to say, here's why we exist and the need that we're trying to serve, and in what way? And how do we set a vision for where we want to get into the future and what are the tenants or the practical values that exist in our organization, that we want to define how we work together in terms of building in that way. And so purpose is a big focus. It's that clarity of the need, the clarity of the quality characteristics that it takes to match that need. Understanding what are the products and services that we have. I know that sounds a little trivial, but you'd be stunned how hard it is, especially in service organizations, for people to actually describe what it is that they do, what are the actual services.   0:54:54.3 Dave Williams: They might have the name of the service or the class or the whatever, but to actually say this is what we deliver, and then really think about how do I use this as our organization's sort of North Star, our aim, so that everything else that follows is going to be about building a system that produces the results that we want and produces the services that match that need. So going forward, that's going to be very, very important in instructing the direction and instructing the way in which we're going to work as a community of professional people together.   0:55:30.8 Andrew Stotz: So after self assessment, we're talking about focusing on improvement. We're talking about building a learning system, and we're talking about revisiting or establishing or developing our purpose?   0:55:43.3 Cliff Norman: Yeah, I'll just add to what you just said there, Andrew. There's three basic things that have to happen when we start working. Number one is create the habit of improvement. Start improvement right away. Second thing, Dave just went through some detail on building a system of improvement. And Dave called that a learning system, which I thought was interesting because that's what Dr. Maccabee called it when he saw the five activities. Said, these are really methods for building a learning organization. And he said, I've never really seen them before, but this is what will come out of this, which is the essence of what you want. You want people continually learning, as Dr. Deming said, so they can continually improve. But the third thing that has to happen is we have to develop internal capability for them to carry this on, because we're not going to be around with them. We've never advertised. We don't advertise for clients, and we only get word of mouth. And we're only in there to do those three things, get them started on the habit of improvement, start building the system improvement so they can take it over.   0:56:43.4 Cliff Norman: And the third thing, start developing internal capability so they can continue it on into the future. So those three things basically take off on day one. And depending on the organization, I think this is critical. Dave, you asked this question the other day, if the context is such they've got things in front of them are so bad and so challenging that they just need to work on improvement. That's where we're going to be focused. But now if they can chew gum and walk at the same time, we're going to start building the system of improvement. And the first people I want on those initial teams, I want people on there who are going to be future improvement advisors. And more importantly, they perceive them as future leaders in the organization. I don't want a cadre of a whole bunch of improvement advisors. I want leaders in the future who actually understand the science of improvement, understand these methods, so when they go to the next department, the next organization, they can carry this on. So those three things start improving, start building a system of improvement. And the third thing, start developing internal capability. Those have got to take off almost simultaneously, depending on the situation, of course.   0:57:49.8 Andrew Stotz: Well, on that note, that's quite a discussion. I'm so happy that we can have this to go in a little bit deeper into the work that you guys have done. Again, the book is Quality As an Organizational Strategy. I got mine on Amazon and it sent it to me. But I wonder if you have any last words that you'd like to share about what we've talked about today in relation to getting started.   0:58:18.3 Cliff Norman: So, Dave, why don't you talk a little bit about. Because I think this is critical. We've just finished Andrew, the book that's going to be for the people who actually have to build this system. So Dave, just say a few things about that if you would, because you.   0:58:32.0 Dave Williams: About the field guide?   0:58:33.8 Cliff Norman: Yeah.   0:58:35.5 Dave Williams: Yeah. Well, so when this body of work was first created, there was the content of which you see in this book. And then there were also a lot of exercises and methods and applications and examples that existed as well. And it was a pretty thick binder. We have created two volumes. One, the book that you have, which is the description of the theory and the method and gives you some of the tools. And we're now in the process of pulling together what we call the QOS Field Guide, which is a guide that is supporting people that are going down this journey. It follows the same structure as the book, with the exception of the, the Getting started chapter that we had at the end is now at the beginning. And it walks through in great detail various ways in which you leaders and practitioners can approach getting started and building the capacity and then working through each of the activities. And it's equal in size, I mean, it's about the same thickness. But what we tried to do is to give people really pragmatic things to do.   1:00:01.1 Dave Williams: So there are exercises where people are simulating an idea or a concept or a particular piece. There are what we call QOS applications, which are where you're actually taking the theory or the method and applying it to your own organization. There are case studies and things that have been built that might allow you to practice. There's wonderful examples of just about everything from all, from people that we have worked with over the years across multiple different fields, from my background in emergency services and healthcare to education to manufacturing to elevator companies, all kinds of great stuff. And so that will be helpful as people are trying to think about pursuing this journey and working through that first phase of developing QOS and moving into using it. And we're in the stages of having it done to be available later this year.   1:01:08.6 Andrew Stotz: Exciting.   1:01:09.2 Cliff Norman: We've tried to make it useful, Andrew, that the people have to stay overnight with the management and actually get something done and build it without being run off. That everything is there for them to make sure that they make it successfully. That's the thing we kept in mind as we kept writing this second volume.   1:01:25.2 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, I mean, I would say my experience with your guys's writing is that it's applicable.   1:01:34.1 Dave Williams: Well, Andrew, one thing I was going to add on you mentioned a lot of different examples. There are a lot of books in which people tell you a theory, but they don't tell you how to do it. Or they tell you about their own experience, but they don't actually convey the theory. The Quality as an Organizational Strategy book is laying out the theory and the methods of this approach built on the foundations of the science of improvement and profound knowledge and the Deming philosophy. The QOS Field Guide adds to that by giving you the methods and the tools and the things. It doesn't mean that that by itself you can't just go through like it's some kind of self guided tour and all of a sudden magic happens. There's a lot of work and learning and things that have to go into going through that process. But between these two volumes, a leadership team has the tools and methods that put them in position to be able to make this journey.   1:02:41.4 Andrew Stotz: Right. Well, let's wrap it up there. On behalf of everyone, I appreciate Dave and Cliff. All that you're doing and you're sharing with us and taking the time to do that. So from everyone at the Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for joining this and bringing your discussion on these topics. And for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. And you can find this book, Quality as an Organizational Strategy at Amazon and other booksellers. Are there even booksellers these days? I don't even know. They're mainly online these days. So this is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'm going to leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, which is "people are entitled to joy in work."  

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 move into, once the plan's in place, you run the experiment. That's the do, right? And so in this particular do, PDSA cycle two here, that team collected both the quantitative data, so that's the five whys interview, and then the quantitative data, that's the daily attendance data. And so, you know, I mentioned that they had chosen four students to do this work with. And so what you're doing in the do is saying, did you do the plan? Basically. And that shouldn't be assumed because things may happen that interrupt the plan or derail the plan or make you change the plan. The guy that's designing these PDSAs is pretty good project manager. He knows improvement science, he knows the Deming stuff pretty well. So largely this experiment ran as planned. It's also for a pretty short time frame, so there's less time for it to go sort of off the rails and go wrong. But one of the student's attendance, it was so poor during this two week period that they never actually held the empathy interview. So you're noting stuff like that. You plan to interview four kids, you actually only interviewed three kids.   0:11:34.9 John Dues: And here's the reason why, we couldn't even get to the part of interviewing the student, this particular student, because he was not there during that two week period when they were gonna do the interviews. And so then the data comes in, right? The data comes in and now we're ready to study what actually happened during that two week period. So with the first student, interestingly, during the course of the PDSA, that daily attendance rate did go up. Right? And he was actually, he did miss a couple days, so it wasn't perfect, but he brought a note and there was actually a medical diagnosis. There was like a excuse reason for those particular days. Right. The second student was that student I was just referring to. So it was, his attendance was so poor that weren't even able to do the interview. That happens that you know, in real life. Third student's, this was a real success story. She was a part of her, the plan that she designed. She was meeting with one of the staff members at the school she attends that she chose one-on-one at the start of the day and she had significantly increased attendance during this two week period.   0:13:04.0 John Dues: And then the last student had this initial bump early in the PDSA and then had four straight sort of missed days at the end of that two week period also due to an illness, due to the flu. So you know, four kids, one uh two kids, pretty good success. Two kids still had some absences throughout the period. And then one kid sort of really didn't break the cycle. Nothing changed. And in fact the interview didn't even occur. Which means there was also no intervention that occurred with that particular student. Even so, with the student where we couldn't do the interview during that period, part of the plan was to get him a more reliable bus stop and we actually were able to change his bus stop, communicate that to the family and then that still didn't lead to increased attendance. And that's, you know, when you, I think when you work like this too, when you are sort of a policymaker or politician and you make these proclamations, we're gonna decrease chronic absenteeism or to cut it in half. And then you say, okay, well here's four students. Do that in two weeks. Do that over the course, just two weeks, just 10 days. How hard could it be? Right. [laughter] You see, you see just how hard these things are in reality. Right. So can't just make these proclamations.   0:14:32.9 Andrew Stotz: And is that part of what you're trying to do also in this process is get people to, you know, I mean, obviously what you'd love is to be able to come up with solutions from these four students. But really what you also are identifying is the other side of that. Wow, this is even harder than I thought.   0:14:50.2 John Dues: Yeah. And I, you know, with the people that work in schools, like the folks that are on this improvement team, none of this is gonna be a surprise to them.   0:14:57.3 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, they already know that, I guess.   0:14:58.6 John Dues: They already know.   0:15:00.3 Andrew Stotz: Yeah.   0:15:00.4 John Dues: Because they're on the front lines. I mean, they already know knew this is, you know, multi layered, challenging problem to address. But on the flip side, there were some pretty encouraging signs that getting, we call it getting proximate to students, individualizing some of those interventions and then including the student in that attendance monitoring and the intervention that it, you know, like I said, there were some success stories. So that first student I talked about, he went from 52% attendance to during the intervention period, it jumped up to 70%. So, you know, it's a short time frame, but a positive sign. That second student that I said that, you know, we never even got to do the interview with, he actually got quite a bit worse. So he had something like 37% attendance and that dropped 10% during that two week period. And then that third student that I said was a real success story, she went from 75% attendance to 96% attendance. And 96% attendance is good. And then the last student, she was the one that I said, you know, there was an initial bump and then kind of fell off, due to the flu at the end, she basically stayed the same. Like she was at right around 56% attendance and stayed right in that mid-50s range during the intervention.   0:16:19.8 Andrew Stotz: And just for, if a listener or a viewer has come in just on this episode and they're trying to understand where we're at, it's maybe you could talk a little bit about what you're doing in the sense that someone may look at it and say, wait a minute, this is just some anecdotes and how does that help you? And then on the other hand, one of the lessons in the business world that people sometimes say these days is do things that don't scale, which is counterintuitive. But what they're trying to get you to do is focus in, on getting it right with a small number of people before you then, you know, decide to go to the next level. So just maybe just give a brief of where it's at in this whole process.   0:17:04.8 John Dues: Yeah, I mean, I think. I mean, that's the whole point of the PDSA. The counterintuitive thing is that while you want to improve things for all students, you may start by working with a single student or a single classroom, or in our case, you know, four students. So, you know, the good thing is, is that what you could possibly do out of a cycle like this is, and this is only two weeks. But there's significant learning. And so what you would then do with cycle three, perhaps if the team decided this was what they're gonna do, is make some adaptation to this process, and if you were feeling confident that the adaptation was gonna work, then you could possibly. It's pretty early cycle two to start spreading this real wide. But I mean, you could spread this, you know, if you wanted to, to instead of four students, maybe you wanna try 10 students, something like that. Right. And in that way, and that's the basic idea, is to go from one student to one classroom of students to maybe one grade level of students to a whole school, perhaps if some type of idea is working really well. But the thing is, is that the whole mantra is, I lost my train of thought. Start small, learn fast. That's the mantra. Right.   0:18:23.7 Andrew Stotz: And then the other question I would have is, to what extent is this, you know, just subject to the Hawthorne effect in the sense that we knew in the many years ago that when they increased the intensity of the light, the workers did better, and then when they reduced the intensity of the light, the workers did better. So it was just that somebody was paying attention to the workers and the result was they appreciated that and so they did better.   0:18:53.9 John Dues: Yeah, I mean, that's possible. I mean, I would say...   0:18:57.0 Andrew Stotz: Which of course. Which of course may be the solution anyways. Right? You know, like, geez, if a teacher was... If each student was greeted by a teacher who cared about them and said, I'm so happy to see you, and it's great that you made it on time. Let's get started. I mean that could change the life of some people for sure. Including me.   0:19:13.7 John Dues: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, like the girl that went from 75% to 96% attendance during the intervention. I wouldn't say, oh my gosh, we're gonna do this school wide now, but what I would say is, wow, that worked for that two week period.   0:19:25.7 Andrew Stotz: We're learning.   0:19:27.5 John Dues: It was relatively easy to do on a daily basis, so let's do more of that. Right. And also another thing you can think about is when you run PDSA cycles and you, let's say you do have really great success on whatever that thing is and you've spread it throughout your system. But now the priorities have changed. There's some other thing that really needs intensive intervention. One thing you can do is sort of as the 10th step in our improvement process is hold the gains. And so you often can then check back in on that thing in a month or two months and just see what the data says. Did it deteriorate because we're not paying as much attention to it or because we put that thing in place and left it in place? Although we're not as hyper focused on it, is it still sort of continuing on in a way that's at least acceptable to us?   0:20:22.3 Andrew Stotz: I just had an idea. Why don't we put a finish line and a countdown clock and a checkered flag and cheer every student as they get over the line?   [laughter]   0:20:35.0 John Dues: Yeah, that would be great. That would be great. The problem is, is the cheering isn't the thing that's preventing them from coming to school.   0:20:45.1 Andrew Stotz: Yeah.   0:20:46.1 John Dues: Maybe like the cherry on top, but you know.   0:20:49.4 Andrew Stotz: Exactly.   0:20:51.6 John Dues: So, so it's tough. Yeah.   0:20:52.2 Andrew Stotz: Great, great example of where superficial things that outsiders see may not really connect with the real trouble that they're struggling with. Yep.   0:21:01.5 John Dues: And remember, the student's not the only part of the process. The people, the staff that were doing these interventions, they reported that this was like a really powerful experience for them. Most of them haven't been through a PDSA cycle before.   0:21:18.6 Andrew Stotz: Right.   0:21:18.6 John Dues: So this.   0:21:20.3 Andrew Stotz: Maybe I was, slogans and exhortations is what I was just talking about.   0:21:24.8 John Dues: Right, right, right. Yeah. But they felt pretty confident that doing more of that thing was a good idea coming out of cycle one and then this second cycle. Now, with that being said, one of the things that we've also discovered is that there's some required intervening that has to happen as kids meet certain thresholds that are required by the state of Ohio. And so I think I mentioned this before, that one of the things that we're doing as a part of the project was mapping out the intervention process in place at each campus. So while the benchmarks are the same for when you need to do that, the how and the who and the when, that there's variation in that. So right now we're taking like each of the campuses mapped out their intervention process for attendance, and we're taking a look at that. And so what we're actually gonna do in the next cycle is work to put together a more standardized approach to these intervention teams. So, and that... And you get that from the team, you know, you're sort of talking about, you know, as we get to the Act.   0:22:38.4 John Dues: I think I've talked about this before. There's sort of the three A's. You can adopt this into your system, write it down in a manual or whatever, you can adapt it, change it a little bit, or if it's really not going well, then you abandon it. So in this case, there's an adaptation where we're gonna sort of shift gears and work on this process mapping and get that put in place 'cause the team feels like that's the highest lever, next thing to do, basically.   0:23:06.5 Andrew Stotz: And is that. Have you already mapped out PDSA 3 now? And you're in that process? Is that. And that's what we're gonna talk about next one, or where are you at with that?   0:23:15.5 John Dues: Yeah, so I think looking at the process maps would be interesting because you can sort of assume that things happen relatively similarly, you know, especially in a small school system like ours. But you're gonna see that there's... And it's not right or wrong necessarily, but there may be a sort of like, again, a better way to do things because there are many... There's sometimes many people involved, many processes, many forms. And so, yeah, we're gonna look and see, basically, is one more efficient than the other, is one more effective than the other, that type of thing.   0:23:51.4 Andrew Stotz: Okay.   0:23:52.3 John Dues: Yeah. So a lot of learning, you know, I mean, I think, and you know, again, this takes time. But, and we're still sort of in that "define the problem" step. But again, the fact that we're studying the problem, the fact that we're talking to kids as a part of it, we're actually learning from data coming from what's happening on the ground. The ultimate solution or set of solutions we come up with are gonna be much more robust, you know, and they're gonna be much more sort of durable into the future, anti-fragile you know, into the future because of this work versus, you know, the typical fly by night. Let's have a pizza party on Friday to encourage kids to come to school, that just... There may be an initial bump, but it's just, this has no durability into the future. Yeah.   0:24:44.8 Andrew Stotz: Great, great. Well, I like that. And I got excited 'cause I thought, oh, maybe we can come up with some incentive or something. But what I see is that the challenge is how do you make it durable? So I like that word. And this was a good discussion on that.   0:25:01.8 John Dues: Yeah. Well, I was just gonna say the other point I would make is, you know, sometimes you can plan, plan, plan, but that, you know, at any point of an improvement process, you can use a PDSA cycle, start running an experiment and start gathering information right away. Just do something, you know, thoughtful, but do something. Don't plan in a room when you can go out and get actual, run actual experiments and get back real data.   0:25:27.5 Andrew Stotz: All right, and one other question I had that just came to my mind is what is the value of doing this in such a structured way as the PDSA versus Oh, come on, John, we're testing things all the time, you know, and let's say that to some extent they are, right? We all are testing every day. Why is it important that it's done in a structured way, in a documented way?   0:25:50.8 John Dues: Well, I mean, one, you have a historical record. Two, you know, we had four. So there's one PDSA cycle, but actually there's four different mini experiments happening, one at each campus. And if you didn't write it down like the guy does that's designing these, every one of the experiments would have been different. And he really thinks through step by step. Okay, put this number here. How are we gonna define that? There's a validated list of definitions of that type of attendance issue that day. Because if you don't have all that stuff, then there's no way to analyze it after the fact, or at least it's a lot less, a lot less efficient.   0:26:28.3 Andrew Stotz: And the learning could be lost too.   0:26:30.1 John Dues: Learning could be lost. And you know, I would venture to guess that, you know, if you run a sort of an experiment haphazardly, especially if there's multiple locations, the people sort of, their definition of the thing that's being measured is gonna vary too.   0:26:45.0 Andrew Stotz: Yeah.   0:26:45.5 John Dues: Almost every time. Almost every time, even subtly.   0:26:50.9 Andrew Stotz: All right, well, that was a great discussion. And on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute. I wanna thank you again for this discussion and for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. You can find John's book, Win-Win, W. Edwards 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.  

Bill Bellows, a quality management expert with 31 years of experience applying Dr. Deming's principles, joins host Andrew Stotz to unpack critical insights from the Misunderstanding Quality series. They discuss the transformative impact of viewing quality through a broader lens, analyzing the Red Bead Experiment's significance in quality management. Bill emphasizes the importance of continuous improvement and understanding system variation, while advocating for fostering a feedback-rich culture to empower individuals and enhance overall performance.

In this discussion, Bill Bellows, a quality improvement expert with over 31 years of experience applying Dr. Deming's philosophy, shares insights on how specification limits can hinder progress. He reflects on Stephen Hawking's captivating lecture, urging listeners to avoid self-comparison and embrace personal growth. Bill challenges conventional quality standards, promoting a mindset of continuous improvement over mere compliance. He also critiques change management strategies, emphasizing the need for proactive adaptation and customer satisfaction in quality pursuits.

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 think.   0:10:19.0 John Dues: Look further ahead and say, "Okay, if I do this, do I actually think this is going to be effective?" And you can also see the team's thinking. Some people might think this is going to be very effective, and some people may think it's not. Some people might think it'll work with some students, but not other students, and it gives you that picture black and white before you actually run the test.   0:10:37.8 Andrew Stotz: And in academic studies, it's really important to identify your end point that you're testing for. Otherwise, you run the risk of switching your end point as you get through your research because you're grounded initially.   0:10:53.2 John Dues: Right, exactly. Right, yep, absolutely. So in this plan, what we did was, this... We had parent conferences coming up, so we just said, that's a natural time to sit down with these four students that we chose at parent conferences. So at the end of November, we did that, we reviewed the data, we sat with the family to discuss some of the causes of the attendance challenges. We explained the plan to track attendance for 15 days coming back from Thanksgiving break. And then part of the plan was collecting that quantitative data, like the actual attendance rates each day for each kid, but then it was qualitative too, because we were asking the family on the front end, what was the sort of overall cause of the problem. And then we were asking the actual student every day like, "Oh, on this particular day, why were you absent, or why were you late, why did you miss school?" And we were tracking that across 15 days, so it's a relatively short time period, 'cause we don't want to go off on some grand experiment and then find out three months from now that our intervention wasn't effective.   0:12:02.5 John Dues: So that was the plan. And then the next step in the PDSA cycle is the do and that's just like it sounds. So we ran the experiment for 15 days and then started gathering that data. So what we found was that in two of the cases, transportation challenges were in fact the primary issue, in the third case, it was sort of transportation, but that was exacerbated by a family that was homeless during this period, and then in the fourth cause, or in the fourth case, there was actually some sort of anxiety issues with coming to school. So you can see three very different causes just across four students. So again, if you don't have that picture, then it's very hard to sort of design the right type of interventions 'cause you don't really know what's going on. You have assumptions, right? So I don't think it's rocket science, but the team learn that there are so many layers to this attendance challenge, and even for a single student, there's often multiple factors rather than some single explanatory variable. And so you have to sort of uncover that, and I think the key thing was that holding these empathy interviews, just these four interviews allowed us to challenge some of our initial assumptions. Like maybe a family doesn't value attendance, that didn't seem to be the case, at least with any of these four students who are facing some serious challenges on the home front.   0:13:48.6 John Dues: But it wasn't like families didn't value school or having their kids attending school, there're just major obstacles. And so digging deeper allowed us to explore these various causes with the families. Another thing that was interesting is that as we talked with the team about... As the data came in and what they were doing, we also learned that we need a better, more systematic process for intervening with chronically absent students, that's everything from reviewing the data, identifying those chronically absent students early on in the school year, for those that we're required to do something like file truancy for those processes and then monitoring attendance, there's various requirements public schools have on that front. Every school is... They have a system in place, and they have a team in place, and they have a process in place for these different things, but they're all doing it differently, and so there's not a standardized process across our system. And another thing is, some parents didn't even realize that they may have a general idea that the attendance isn't great, but don't... Most parents don't actually realize what is the actual attendance rate of their child, how far off is it from what's considered exceptional or at least okay attendance.   0:15:17.6 John Dues: Almost nobody has that. Those numbers at the ready. Another thing that has happened as we studied the data was that there was a really wide variation in terms of the difference in student daily attendance between the period of the intervention and end of the school year up to that point. So there's basically a lot of learning going on with just a very simple four student experiment. So even though the predictions weren't perfect, and one thing with the predictions is, this is Cycle 1, so what should happen over time as we gain knowledge about our system, is that the predictions get closer and closer to what actually happens because we're learning with every PDSA cycle that we're running basically. So the last part is, then you act, so we've done the plan, we've done the do, the study, and the act, and the way I frame this is that you have three As that you can choose from in the Act segment. You can adopt that change that you've tested, you're going to adapt that into the next cycle, or you can say this is not working at all and you can abandon it and just do something else.   0:16:34.2 John Dues: Yeah, those are the three options. So what we've actually decided to do, what happens in a lot of early tests, is we're going to adapt Cycle 1 into Cycle 2, and in fact, Cycle 2 has actually already started. But the aim of Cycle 2 now is we're going to increase the extent to which we're involving students and families in the data collection process, and we're going to hold what we call like a... We call this a 5 Whys Empathy interview with each student that we've identified, and then use that to create a plan for a PDSA that's specific to that one student, basically. So it's going to be very hyper-focused and so we're going to collect this data for two weeks, we recognize that doing this intensive of a process with the entire school or the entire group of students that are chronic absent probably isn't possible, but what we're doing is learning so much from this, that seemed like we're going to take another step to learn more and work with the individual student to set up the next round of interventions.   0:17:49.4 Andrew Stotz: And what are you guys expecting for an outcome? You know, talking about prediction? I don't know. Should we think about where are you going to be in one year or two years, three years?   0:18:00.7 John Dues: Oh no. It's very closely tied with the PDSA. So if it's a two-week PDSA, then we're actually saying, what is that the average daily attendance going to be for that two-week period?   0:18:11.7 Andrew Stotz: Yep. Yep.   0:18:14.3 John Dues: I mean. It's very tightly closed. Yeah.   0:18:14.8 Andrew Stotz: What I'm saying though, let's just take the attendance levels that we've seen in the chart, let's just talk about annual and let's say, "Okay, one year from now, two years from now."   0:18:23.7 John Dues: Oh yeah. That's right. Oh I see.   0:18:26.7 Andrew Stotz: Are you... Is it right to make a prediction about where you think you would be or is that not the right way to do it?   0:18:32.0 John Dues: I think it's too early in the process to make... I see what you're saying now you're talking about the actual... That overall system measurement. Yeah, I think it's too early to make a prediction on that, if you were holding a gun to my head and making me put money down, my prediction would be right in line with what it is this year, basically. I would think it... Because it's a stable system. Those last four years, all bounce around 50-55%, like you said. So my bet would be on 50-55%. Because...   0:19:11.2 Andrew Stotz: And what would... How would things change for you or the school? Let's just imagine hypothetically... I'm going to push back a little bit here and just get some thinking, but from a hypothetical perspective, let's say a new school opened up and their number one focus was chronic absenteeism, and they decided that the most important thing for them is to solve that problem. And they had been doing it for a while in other locations, and now they've come in, now you're competing with them. They're an option for some people, and they're just the place for others, and let's just say that they have optimized for chronic absenteeism and it's down to 10% at their school. Does that change how you think about what you're doing? Again, it's hypothetical, but I'm just curious. How does that...   0:20:01.3 John Dues: No. Not me, because this is what our system produces right now, so... Yeah, I think I would say I don't have enough information to make a prediction about what the ultimate outcome measure will be.   0:20:19.4 Andrew Stotz: And I guess you could say this is what our system produces in this area based upon what we see as important, right? Like this is...   0:20:32.4 John Dues: Yeah. That's fair.   0:20:33.2 Andrew Stotz: And there may be another area that you think is very important in that those numbers in that area may be very, very different from that, but another... Go ahead.   0:20:43.7 John Dues: Yeah, well, I was going to say, so in this attendance team, there's... The empathy interview is going on with these four students, and then in the Act phase, we also said we're launching an effort to make the intervention process more consistent across all of our schools. And we're starting by understanding the process that's in place right now, but this team is not the only team pulling levers that ultimately could impact attendance. I think they're pulling important levers, but there are other improvement teams across the school system, for example, I think I mentioned this maybe a few episodes ago, transportation. Transportation did come up like we thought it would in three of the four interviews. So, and we have mentioned how poor the bussing has been in Columbus for the last several school years, but especially last year and this year. And so we're working to see can we do something significantly different next year on the transportation front.   0:22:00.1 John Dues: And I think if we can pull that lever, that also... But that would be a change to the system, like a very significant change. Now, if that went through, I would be much more confident about making a prediction about improvement on the attendance front next year, so.   0:22:17.9 Andrew Stotz: If I look...   0:22:19.2 John Dues: It's not going to solve our problems though. Yep.   0:22:21.2 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. If I look at my roasting business for coffee, if I replace my pretty much manual roasting machine with a fully automated high-tech one, it's going to have a massive improvement in variability. Invariability is going to reduce way beyond what our current system can produce and it will happen in a day, right? When that happens, it'll happen in a day.   0:22:47.4 John Dues: Yeah.   0:22:52.9 Andrew Stotz: And being late for class is a big bag-a-boo of teachers here in Thailand, particularly at universities where I go to, and it's a problem and nobody likes it and students come in late and all that. But I solved that problem with just the twist of my finger, one twist of my fingers, and I solved it. What was that twist? I locked the door. And then as the students were outside waiting to come inside, I would eventually go out and I'd say, "Look, it's important to me that you're on time. I'm going to lock this door. If you can't make it... You got to figure out how to make it." I know you got two hours of traffic and you're coming in from abroad, or you're coming in from outside of the city, I know that your parents don't have the money to pay for a car for you and you got to take the subway or you've got... I know. Everybody's got their circumstances, but you're making an effort to get here, I want you to get here on time.   0:23:52.4 Andrew Stotz: The next class that I have, everybody's on time. So one of the questions I have, and this is, again, push back is, some people may look at this and go, "Oh. Come on. All this work. Why don't we just massively prioritize and focus." Let's just say that... Let's just say, I don't know what the answer is, but let's just say that the principle of the school, all the teachers and all the students gather out in the front area at the time that you're supposed to be at school, and there's a band playing. Everybody's cheering. We're getting ready. Whatever that thing is. I remember a boss I had that used to have a stand-up meeting every single morning, and you didn't miss it. And so for some people who are listening, they may think, "Oh, come on, John, you're going through all this stuff and it's not going to improve. Why aren't you just taking more aggressive action right now."   0:24:48.9 John Dues: Well, I didn't say I was going to improve it, I just said I wasn't going to make a prediction.   0:24:51.9 Andrew Stotz: Yes. Yes. Sorry. I didn't mean...   0:24:53.8 John Dues: So yeah. What would I say? I think when you have... So the person that is in charge of this project, for example, I don't know that anybody's ever gotten better results while a principal of a school in Ohio with the challenges that he faced. So this is not people that aren't driven to get extraordinary results. This is a multi-faceted problem that is incredibly tough to improve, and when I have the view point of sitting down with the students and hearing what is... Keep the obstacles are... It is just a very hard thing, and I'd say one of the reasons we're pulling that transportation lever early, or at least attempting to is because that's such a big part. Again, that's not going to solve everything. But like I said, if we were able to pull that lever and it's a big if because we get no funding for transportation. All the funding flows through the school district, so that's a massive obstacle. Millions of dollars that we aren't allocated to do this service, someone else is. So right now we don't have control over it, and so those are the types of obstacles, we can't just buy buses, for example. Because...   0:26:36.1 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And it's like you got 50 problems that you're trying to...   0:26:41.7 John Dues: 50 problems.   0:26:41.7 Andrew Stotz: And 50 more constraints that you're operating within.   0:26:45.9 John Dues: Yeah. And so we were attacking it from multiple angles, so we were attacking it on the attendance front with kids, at the State House with funding, with trying to see if we can set up our own transportation system even without that funding. So there's many, many levers being attempted, but they are not quick and easy, simple, so.   0:27:12.8 Andrew Stotz: And for a listener who's listening to this, who may not be the CEO of a company, let's say who's got resources he can allocate or she can allocate, they also may be in a situation like, "This is all I can impact. I can impact this area, but I have to be realistic about what resources I have."   0:27:33.6 John Dues: Yeah, and I think one of the things we're doing too, we don't have rose colored glasses on, we're saying, even if we did fix this transportation system, and that's a big if again. That doesn't mean that the chronic absenteeism problem is going to be solved. Maybe it's significantly better, maybe it goes down to 30%, 35%, if we had a good transportation system, but that still means... And even before transportation was such an issue, even before the pandemic, these rates were still... The quarter of the kids who are so chronically absent, that's way too high, that's way too high. So we recognize that, but these are very, very thorny problems to try to improve.   0:28:15.0 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. Well, and also you're trying to make lasting change too, so.   0:28:18.6 John Dues: Lasting change. Yeah.   0:28:19.6 Andrew Stotz: Yep.   0:28:19.7 John Dues: Yep. Yeah.   0:28:22.1 Andrew Stotz: Okay. Great. So I'm going to wrap it up there. And thanks...   0:28:23.3 John Dues: Yeah. Absolutely.   0:28:24.6 Andrew Stotz: And thank you for, on behalf of the Deming Institute, and I want to encourage all the listeners out there to follow what John's doing and what he's talking about, and of course, go to Deming.org to continue your journey. You can get his book, Win-Win, W. Edwards Deming, The System of Profound Knowledge and the Science of Improving Schools on amazon.com. And 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.

Bill Bellows, a quality improvement expert with over 31 years of experience applying Dr. Deming's principles, joins the discussion to debunk common misconceptions about measuring quality. He highlights that true improvement doesn't stem from mere metrics but from understanding functionality and customer needs. Bill shares engaging examples illustrating how teamwork can falter when individual interests overshadow collaboration. The conversation emphasizes creating holistic, desirable solutions in organizations to ensure both quality and profitability.

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 become a competitive advantage. And so I was just curious too about public versus private schools. I'm assuming that private schools in America have more ability to have the continuity of leadership or is that not the case?   0:10:03.9 John Dues: Well, I don't know. I mean, I wouldn't have the data to say, one way or the other. I would suspect that in a private setting there may be more leadership stability. I mean, the other thing that you're having to deal with in a public school system, most public school systems, traditional public school systems especially, is there's a publicly elected board that those five or seven people are who the superintendent reports to and those people they turn over as elections occur on a staggered basis. And so, yeah, I mean, getting that continuity is really, really tough. And so I think finding especially of larger districts, especially of urban districts, finding that continuity of leadership, especially at the superintendent level, is very difficult for those reasons.   0:10:58.4 Andrew Stotz: So I'm going to stop and talk for just a second about that because one of the lessons I've learned in business and in life is that when you identify that everybody's doing this thing and they're all kind of bound by this and they're stuck in this situation, that is your opportunity to differentiate.   0:11:12.8 John Dues: Yeah.   0:11:13.3 Andrew Stotz: Once you identify that point, everything you can do, knowing they're tangled up in this problem, in this mess that they cannot break free from unless they have a huge amount of political will or force of will, then you know that if you could do something differently, you would be able to differentiate your school, your business, your social enterprise or whatever it is. So it's a great little trigger to something I'm always looking for in business.   0:11:40.4 John Dues: Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. That continuity of leadership is a key differentiator if you can have stable leadership. No doubt. It's hard to get anything done if you don't, especially in a complex system. But in this particular case, as you would imagine, if five of the six answers to those questions were no, we didn't do enough study yet or we don't have enough understanding yet then the team obviously concluded that we didn't have enough information to write a precise problem statement. And this is where I talk to people because we do have this improvement model. And then it's under that is this improvement process. And there are steps, but it's not a recipe.   0:12:19.1 John Dues: So you can't just go from step one to two to three to four and four to five. And some people sort of get that and some people don't like that messier process. And this is sort of where the art comes in. But one of the key tools in this case that we're using, and we've talked about it before, is we don't have enough information. Typically, we start running experiments later in the process, PDSA cycles, Plan, Do Study, Act cycles. When we have a set of solutions, we want to start testing them. But there's other times you can use PDSA. I actually recommend doing this pretty early in the process when you need to gather more information or run a mini experiment. That's the perfect time, no matter what step it is, to run a PDSA cycle and start to gather that information, because otherwise, with this process, it can become a little disconnected. You can talk about things forever.   0:13:15.4 John Dues: And so you do wanna think, you do wanna slow down, you wanna be deliberate, but you also wanna run some tests right away and start small and start to learn some things that will later on inform the full set of interventions you're going to try or the full set of solutions you're going to try. So that's what we did in this particular case where we didn't feel like we had enough information to write the problem statement, we said, let's stop and let's run a PDSA cycle. So I'll just kind of walk through the objective of this first cycle. So we ran this right before break.   0:13:51.9 John Dues: So we ran it for 20 days right before our winter break, so sort of like the second half of December. And so the objective of this particular PDSA and this is sort of will take us to the end of this episode is, we already know that there's this high percentage of students that have significant attendance challenges. We know that average daily attendance across our four campuses is somewhere between 85 and 88%, and chronic absenteeism is somewhere in the low 40% range. So that's information we've started to gather. We know all that. We know there's this problem. But while the attendance team, they have some definite thoughts on what's causing so many students to miss so much school, things we've talked about, transportation, health, family instability. But we really wanted to test those assumptions early on through this structured format, this structured PDSA cycle.   0:14:56.4 John Dues: And so what we did... And again, especially at the start, if it's the first cycle in a project, you want to have a pretty narrow focus. So with this PDSA cycle, what we're going to do is... Or what we did was we picked one student. Sounds kind of crazy. You got all these students you need to help. But we picked one student at each campus. And so we have this improvement team that has people from each campus. And we said, what's a student that you'd want to dig into and learn some more about that's having attendance issues? And there's no shortage of students to pick. But what we settled on was the kind of the frame was, here are four students that are having attendance issues. And we've had trouble really figuring out what the cause is.   0:15:43.5 John Dues: So if we're going to focus on just one student on our campus, let's pick one where we've had some struggles to find additional information. So what we did was, pick those four students, and then we started tracking their attendance very closely over those three weeks of the PDSA cycle. And we came up with a system to categorize every single absence event. And it was a sort of predetermined list, like a validated list, so that it was kind of a balance between having simply qualitative perceptions of why kids are absent and we didn't want to just have like five reasons either that they need some more detail. You actually don't know enough if you just put transportation.   0:16:30.7 John Dues: So we ended up with about a list of about 20 or so, and that kind of got adjusted at the start of the cycle. And then what we did was, we sat down and talked with those students and their families, every one of those four. So the team, the school based team, there was a point person or two that sat down and kind of dug into the attendance challenges with the students and their parents and started categorizing and adding context to the various absences that had happened up to that point in the year. And then also across those three weeks, right?   0:17:07.1 John Dues: And then a key part of this is, so we kind of outline that as an objective. And then we said, okay, while this isn't like a really intense attendance intervention, it is an intervention to sit down and talk with people and try to categorize and problem solve a little bit about what the problems are and how might the parent get the kid to school over those next three weeks.   0:17:31.0 John Dues: So at this point, one of the things that we did, and this is where we'll pick back up next week or the next time we talk with the plan is, we had our team members predict, what do you think is gonna happen when we sit down and have these conversations? And do you think the conversations in and of themselves are gonna impact the students attendance rates? And I think that's a good place to pick up in our next conversation. It was pretty fascinating, the first experiment, actually. So I think listeners will get a lot out of hearing those results in our next session.   0:18:10.8 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, it's exciting as we've gone through this, thinking about how we can apply all this into, I've been taking tons of notes from our discussions on this, and I know the other listeners and viewers are to try to think about how do we adjust our own way of even thinking about improvement. And I know from my perspective, I think I would argue that my discussions with you have helped me to slow down in my improvement process.   0:18:40.7 John Dues: Yeah, I think that's often... I mean, because there's so much urgency to... And whatever our business area is, urgency to get it right, urgency to change, urgency to improve. But like what I see in schools, schools have an attendance problem. And I'm sure there's some schools that do a really good job on this front. But a lot of schools, what they're going to do is they're going to have some type of attendance incentive. We're going to have pizza party Fridays if you came all week. Might that have some short term impact? Maybe. But you're not solving the actual problems that are leading to the attendance challenges in the first place. So...   0:19:20.7 Andrew Stotz: In my online Valuation Masterclass Bootcamp, one of the big improvements that I've worked on is I've realized that I don't think we've defined the assignments as well as we could. And so I'm looking at the outcome and I'm thinking, the outcome isn't what I want. I want it better. And then I realize I've got to go back. And all of a sudden, two bootcamps ago, it made me realize I need to actually physically separate the lecture on the assignment.   0:19:54.5 Andrew Stotz: And so I've now, for every week of the six weeks on Mondays, I release a video and I say, this is your assignment and here's all the questions you're going to have. But more importantly, what I always do is I say, this is what it should look like. This is from the prior best example from last class. And all I ask of you is to try to beat this.   0:20:21.3 John Dues: That's great. Yeah.   0:20:22.5 Andrew Stotz: And then students are inspired and they're seeing, you could say, well, you just giving them the... You're giving them the result, okay, so my students are doing studies on industry in particular, what I'm talking about like the automotive industry. So they may see a prior students that just got an A plus, they were great. I don't give grades in the bootcamp, but let's say it's A plus work. Great. I'm happy to show them that and let them see that and say, now I want to challenge you to do better.   0:20:49.3 Andrew Stotz: And I think that is another addition. And I'm finding we're getting a lot less questions. The only questions we're getting from the people that haven't watched that video, if they haven't watched the assignment video, then they have all these questions. But also what's fascinating is that what we're seeing is a much improved outcome. And all of a sudden, as a teacher, on our feedback Fridays, when the students are presenting their work of the week, I'm spending a lot less time going, wait a minute, you got a grammar mistake in there or you got this or that or all that stuff's gone and now I'm focusing on the quality of their logic and their argument and that type of thing, which is exactly what I want to be doing. So just the idea of constantly improving is just so exciting.   0:21:35.2 John Dues: Yeah, I think... And I think a lot of people on our team have this natural inclination to sit down... Want to sit down with families, spend time with them and problem solve some of these issues. But when you zoom out and look at the problem and how big it is, you don't know where to start. So this gave people a place. One student, like, have one longer... I know we can't do this probably with all our kids across the entire school, but let's do this with one student and see what we learn and then use that learning to build the next cycle. And that's really what this is about, is that the power of the PDSA at any point in the improvement process, whether it's testing intervention or in a scenario like this where you need to get more information before you go on to the next step. I think PDSA can be used at any time of an improvement project.   0:22:27.9 Andrew Stotz: Wonderful. Well, John, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion and for listeners. Remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. You can find John's book, Win Win: W. Edwards Deming, the System of Profound Knowledge and the Science of Improving Schools on Amazon.com and 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.

What if you could transform quality from a compliance exercise into a strategic advantage? In our latest podcast, Andrew Stotz sits down with Cliff Norman and David M. Williams, two of the authors of Quality as an Organizational Strategy. They share untold stories of Dr. Deming, hard-earned insights from decades of real-world application, and a framework for making quality the driving force behind lasting business success. - How can organizations move beyond quality improvement projects to make quality their core strategy? - How do the five key activities outlined in their book create a system for sustainable success? - Why has this work, developed over 30+ years, remained largely behind the scenes—until now? Don’t miss this conversation that challenges conventional thinking and reveals how organizations can thrive, not just survive. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, we have a fantastic opportunity to learn more about a recent book that's been published called "Quality as an Organizational Strategy". And I'd like to welcome Cliff Norman and Dave Williams on the show, two of the three authors. Welcome, guys.   0:00:27.1 Cliff Norman: Thank you. Glad to be here.   0:00:29.4 Dave Williams: Yeah, thanks for having us.   0:00:31.9 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, I've been looking forward to this for a while. I was on LinkedIn originally, and somebody posted it. I don't remember who, the book came out. And I immediately ordered it because I thought to myself, wait, wait, wait a minute. This plugs a gap. And I just wanna start off by going back to Dr. Deming's first Point, which was create constancy of purpose towards improvement of product and service with the aim to become competitive and stay in business and to provide jobs. And all along, as anybody that learned the 14 Points, they knew that this was the concept of the strategy is to continue to improve the product and service in the eyes of the client and in your business. But there was a lot missing. And I felt like your book has started really to fill that gap. So maybe I'll ask Cliff, if you could just explain kind of where does this book come from and why are you bringing it out now?   0:01:34.5 Cliff Norman: That's a really good question, Andrew. The book was originally for the use of both our clients only. So it came into being, the ideas came out of the Deming four day seminar where Dr. Tom Nolan, Ron Moen and Lloyd Provost, Jerry Langley would be working with Dr. Deming. And then at the end of four days, the people who some of who are our clients would come up to us and said, he gave us the theory, but we don't have any methods. And so they took it very seriously and took Dr. Deming's idea of production viewed as a system. And from that, they developed the methods that we're going to discuss called the five activities. And all of our work with this was completely behind the wall of our clients. We didn't advertise. So the only people who became clients were people who would seek us out. So this has been behind the stage since about 1990. And the reason to bring it out now is to make it available beyond our client base. And Dave, I want you to go ahead and add to that because you're the ones that insisted that this get done. So add to that if you would.   [laughter]   0:02:53.0 Dave Williams: Well, thanks, Cliff. Actually, I often joke at Cliff. So one thing to know, Cliff and Lloyd and I all had a home base of Austin, Texas. And I met them about 15 years ago when I was in my own journey of, I had been a chief quality officer of an ambulance system and was interested in much of the work that API, Associates of Process Improvement, had been doing with folks in the healthcare sector. And I reached out to Cliff and Lloyd because they were in Austin and they were kind enough, as they have been over many years, to welcome me to have coffee and talk about what I was trying to learn and where my interests were and to learn from their work. And over the last 15 years, I've had a great benefit of learning from the experience and methods that API has been using with organizations around the world, built on the shoulders of the theories from Dr. Deming. And one of those that was in the Improvement Guide, one of the foundational texts that we use a lot in improvement project work that API wrote was, if you go into the back, there is a chapter, and Cliff, correct me if I'm wrong, I think it's chapter 13 in this current edition on creating value.   0:04:34.3 Dave Williams: In there, there was some description of kind of a structure or a system of activities that would be used to pursue qualities and organizational strategy. I later learned that this was built on a guide that was used that had been sort of semi self-published to be able to use with clients. And the more that I dove into it, the more that I really valued the way in which it had been framed, but also how, as you mentioned at the start, it provided methods in a place where I felt like there was a gap in what I saw in organizations that I was working with or that I had been involved in. And so back in 2020, when things were shut down initially during the beginning of the pandemic, I approached Lloyd and Cliff and I said, I'd love to help in any way that I can to try to bring this work forward and modernize it. And I say modernize it, not necessarily in terms of changing it, but updating the material from its last update into today's context and examples and make it available for folks through traditional bookstores and other venues.   0:05:58.9 Andrew Stotz: And I have that The Improvement Guide, which is also a very impressive book that helps us to think about how are we improving. And as you said, the, that chapter that you were talking about, 13, I believe it was, yeah, making the improvement of value a business strategy and talking about that. So, Cliff, could you just go back in time for those people that don't know you in the Deming world, I'm sure most people do, but for those people that don't know, maybe you could just talk about your first interactions with Dr. Deming and the teachings of that and what sparked your interest and also what made you think, okay, I wanna keep expanding on this.   0:06:40.0 Cliff Norman: Yeah. So I was raised in Southern California and of course, like many others, I'm rather horrified by what's going on out there right now with fires. That's an area I was raised in. And so I moved to Texas in '79, went to work for Halliburton. And they had an NBC White Paper called, "If Japan Can, Why Can't We?", and our CEO, Mr. Purvis Thrash, he saw that. And I was working in the quality area at that time. And he asked me to go to one of Deming's seminars that was held in Crystal City, actually February of 1982. And I got down there early and got a place up front. And they sent along with me an RD manager to keep an eye on me, 'cause I was newly from California into Texas. And so anyway, we're both sitting there. And so I forgot something. So I ran up stairs in the Sheraton Crystal City Hotel there. And I was coming down and lo and behold, next floor down, Dr. Deming gets on and two ladies are holding him up. And they get in the elevator there and he sees this George Washington University badge and he kind of comes over, even while the elevator was going down and picks it up and looks it up real close to his face. And then he just backs up and leans, holds onto the railing and he says, Mr. Norman, what I'm getting ready to tell you today will haunt you for the rest of your life.   0:08:11.8 Cliff Norman: And that came true. And of course, I was 29 at the time and was a certified quality engineer and knew all things about the science of quality. And I couldn't imagine what he would tell me that would haunt me for the rest of my life, but it did. And then the next thing he told me, he said, as young as you are, if you're not learning from somebody that you're working for, you ought to think about getting a new boss. And that's some of the best advice I've ever gotten. I mean, the hanging around smart people is a great thing to do. And I've been gifted with that with API. And so that's how I met him. And then, of course, when I joined API, I ended up going to several seminars to support Lloyd Provost and Tom Nolan and Ron Moen and Jerry as the various seminars were given. And Ron Moen, who unfortunately passed away about three years ago, he did 88 of those four day seminars, and he was just like a walking encyclopedia for me. So anytime I had questions on Deming, I could just, he's a phone call away, and I truly miss that right now.   0:09:20.5 Cliff Norman: So when Dave has questions or where this reference come from or whatever, and I got to go do a lot of work, where Ron, he could just recall that for me. So I miss that desperately, but we were busy at that time, by the time I joined API was in '88. And right away, I was introduced to what they had drafted out in terms of the five activities, which is the foundation of the book, along with understanding the science of improvement and the chain reaction that Dr. Deming introduced us to. So the science of improvement is what Dr. Deming called the System of Profound Knowledge. So I was already introduced to all that and was applying that within Halliburton. But QBS, as we called it then, Qualities of Business Strategy was brand new. I mean, it was hot off the press. And right away, I took it and started working with my clients with it. And we were literally walking on the bridge as we were building it. And the lady I'm married to right now, Jane Norman, she was working at Conagra, which is like a $15 billion poultry company that's part of Conagra overall, which is most of the food in your grocery store, about 75% of it. And she did one of the first system linkages that we ever did.   0:10:44.5 Cliff Norman: And since then, she's worked at like four other companies as a VP or COO, and has always applied these ideas. And so a lot of this in the book examples and so forth, comes from her actual application work. And when we'd worked together, she had often introduced me, this is my husband, Cliff, he and his partners, they write books, but some of us actually have to go to work. And then eventually she wrote a book with me with Dr. Maccabee, who is also very closely associated with Dr. Deming. So now she's a co-author. So I was hoping that would stop that, but again, we depend on her for a lot of the examples and contributions and the rest of it that show up in the book. So I hope that answers your question.   0:11:28.2 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, and for people like myself and some of our listeners who have heard Dr. Deming speak and really gotten into his teachings, it makes sense, this is going to haunt you because I always say that, what I read originally... I was 24 when I went to my first Deming seminar. And I went to two two-day seminars and it... My brain was open, I was ready, I didn't have anything really in it about, any fixed methods or anything. So, for me, it just blew my mind, some of the things that he was talking about, like thinking about things in a system I didn't think about that I thought that the way we got to do is narrow things down and get this really tight focus and many other things that I heard. And also as a young, young guy, I was in this room with, I don't know, 500 older gentlemen and ladies, and I sat in the front row and so I would see him kind of call them on the carpet and I would be looking back like, oh, wow, I never saw anybody talk to senior management like that and I was kind of surprised. But for those people that really haven't had any of that experience they're new to Deming, what is it that haunts you? What is... Can you describe what he meant when he was saying that?   0:12:42.9 Cliff Norman: I gotta just add to what you just said because it's such a profound experience. And when you're 29, if most of us, we think we're pretty good shape by that time, the brain's fully developed by age 25, judgment being the last function that develops. And so you're pretty well on your way and then to walk in and have somebody who's 81 years old, start introducing you to things you've never even thought about. The idea of the Chain Reaction that what I was taught as a certified quality engineer through ASQ is I need to do enough inspection, but I didn't need to do too much 'cause I didn't want to raise costs too much. And Dr. Deming brought me up on stage and he said, well, show me that card again. So I had a 105D card, it's up to G now or something. And he said, "well, how does this work?" And I said, "well, it tells me how many samples I got to get." And he says, "you know who invented that." And I said, "no, sir, I thought God did." He said, "no, I know the people that did it. They did it to put people like you out of business. Sit down, young man, you've got a lot to learn." And I thought, wow, and here you are in front of 500 people and this is a public flogging by any stretch.   0:13:56.1 Cliff Norman: And it just went on from there. And so a few years later, I'm up in Valley Forge and I'm working at a class with Lloyd and Tom Nolan and a guy named, I never met before named Jim Imboden. And he's just knock-down brilliant, but they're all working at General Motors at that time. And a lot of the book "Planned Experimentation" came out of their work at Ford and GM and Pontiac and the rest of it. And I mean, it's just an amazing contribution, but I go to dinner with Jim that night. And Jim looks at me across the table and he says, Cliff, how did you feel the day you found out you didn't know anything about business economics or anything else? I said, "you mean the first day of the Deming seminar?" He said, "that's what I'm talking about." And that just... That's how profound that experience is. Because all of a sudden you find out you can improve quality and lower costs at the same time. I'm sorry, most people weren't taught that. They certainly weren't taught that in business school. And so it was a whole transformation in thinking and just the idea of a system. Most of what's going on in the system is related to the system and the way it's constructed. And unfortunately, for most organizations, it's hidden.   0:15:04.2 Cliff Norman: They don't even see it. So when things happen, the first thing that happens is the blame flame. I had a VP I worked for and he'd pulled out his org chart when something went bad and he'd circle. He said, this is old Earl's bailiwick right here. So Cliff, go over and see Earl and I want you to straighten him out. Well, that's how most of it runs. And so the blame flame just takes off. And if you pull the systems map out there and if he had to circle where it showed up, he'd see there were a lot of friends around that that were contributing. And we start to understand the complexity of the issue. But without that view, and Deming insisted on, then you're back to the blame flame.   0:15:45.1 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And Dave, I see a lot of books on the back on your shelf there about quality and productivity and team and many different things. But maybe you could give us a little background on kind of how how you, besides how you got onto this project and all that. But just where did you come from originally and how did you stumble into the Deming world?   0:16:08.9 Dave Williams: Sure. Well, sadly, I didn't have the pleasure of getting to sit in on a four-day workshop. Deming died in 1993. And at that time, I was working on an ambulance as a street paramedic and going to college to study ambulance system design and how to manage ambulance systems, which was a part of public safety that had sort of grown, especially in the United States in the '60s. And by the time I was joining, it was about 30 years into becoming more of a formalized profession. And I found my way to Austin, Texas, trying to find one of the more professionalized systems to work in and was, worked here as a paramedic for a few years. And then decided I wanted to learn more and started a graduate program. And one of the courses that was taught in the graduate program, this is a graduate program on ambulance management, was on quality. And it was taught by a gentleman who had written a, a guide for ambulance leaders in the United States that was based on the principles and methods of quality that was happening at this time. And it pieced together a number of different common tools and methods like Pareto charts and cause-and-effect diagrams and things like that.   0:17:33.1 Dave Williams: And it mentioned the different leaders like Deming and Juran and Crosby and others. And so that was my first exposure to many of these ideas. And because I was studying a particular type of healthcare delivery system and I was a person who was practicing within it and I was learning about these ideas that the way that you improve a system or make improvement is by changing the system. I was really intrigued and it just worked out at the time. One of the first roles, leadership roles that emerged in my organization was to be the Chief Quality Officer for the organization. And at the time, there were 20 applicants within my organization, but I was the only one that knew anything about any of the foundations of quality improvements. Everybody else applied and showed their understanding of quality from a lived experience perspective or what their own personal definitions of quality were, which was mostly around inspection and quality assurance. I had, and this won't surprise Cliff, but I had a nerdy response that was loaded with references and came from all these different things that I had been exposed to. And they took a chance on me because I was the only one that seemed to have some sense of the background. And I started working and doing...   0:19:10.1 Dave Williams: Improvement within this ambulance system as the kind of the dedicated leader who was supposed to make these changes. And I think one of the things that I learned really quickly is that frequently how improvement efforts were brought to my attention was because there was a problem that I, had been identified, a failure or an error usually attributed to an individual as Cliff pointed out, somebody did something and they were the unfortunate person who happened to kind of raise this issue to others. And if I investigated it all, I often found that there were 20 other people that made the same error, but he was, he or she was the only one that got caught. And so therefore they were called to my office to confess. And when I started to study and look at these different issues, every time I looked at something even though I might be able to attribute the, first instance to a person, I found 20 or more instances where the system would've allowed or did allow somebody else to make a similar error.   0:20:12.6 Dave Williams: We just didn't find it. And it got... And it became somewhat fascinating to me because my colleagues were very much from a, if you work hard and just do your job and just follow the policy then good quality will occur. And nobody seemed to spend any time trying to figure out how to create systems that produce good results or figure out how to look at a system and change it and get better results. And so most of my experience was coming from these, when something bubbled up, I would then get it, and then I'd use some systems thinking and some methods and all of a sudden unpack that there was a lot of variation going on and a lot of errors that could happen, and that the system was built to get results worse than we even knew.   0:21:00.7 Dave Williams: And it was through that journey that I ended up actually becoming involved with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and learning about what was being done in the healthcare sector, which API at the time were the key advisors to Dr. Don Berwick and the leadership at IHI. And so much of the methodology was there. And actually, that's how I found my way to Cliff. I happened to be at a conference for the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, and there was an advertisement for a program called the Improvement Advisor Professional Development Program, which was an improvement like practitioner project level program that had been developed by API that had been adapted to IHI, and I noticed that Cliff and Lloyd were the faculty, and that they were in my hometown. And that's how I reached out to them and said, hey can we have coffee? And Cliff said, yes. And so...   0:21:53.1 Andrew Stotz: And what was that, what year was that roughly?   0:22:00.3 Dave Williams: That would've been back in 2002 or 2003, somewhere in that vicinity.   0:22:02.0 Andrew Stotz: Hmm. Okay.   0:22:06.8 Dave Williams: Maybe a little bit later.   0:22:06.9 Andrew Stotz: I just for those people that are new to the topic and listening in I always give an example. When I worked at Pepsi... I graduated in 1989 from university with a degree in finance. And I went to work at Pepsi in manufacturing and warehouse in Los Angeles at the Torrance Factory originally, and then in Buena Park. But I remember that my boss told me, he saw that I could work computers at that time, and so I was making charts and graphs just for fun to look at stuff. And he said, yeah, you should go to a one of these Deming seminars. And so he sent me to the one in... At George Washington University back in 1990, I think it was. And but what was happening is we had about a hundred trucks we wanted to get out through a particular gate that we had every single morning. And the longer it took to get those trucks out the longer they're gonna be on LA traffic and on LA roads, so if we can get 'em out at 5:00 AM, fantastic. If we get 'em out at 7:00, we're in trouble. And so they asked me to look at this and I did a lot of studying of it and I was coming for like 4:00 in the morning I'd go up to the roof of the building and I'd look down and watch what was happening. And then finally I'd interview everybody. And then finally the truck drivers just said, look, the loaders mess it up so I gotta open my truck every morning and count everything on it. And I thought, oh, okay.   0:23:23.7 Andrew Stotz: So I'll go to the loaders. And I go, why are you guys messing this up? And then the loaders was like, I didn't mess it up. We didn't have the production run because the production people changed the schedule, and so we didn't have what the guy needed. And so, and oh, yeah, there was a mistake because the production people put the product in the wrong spot, and therefore, I got confused and I put the wrong stuff on by accident. And then I went to the production people and they said, well, no, it's not us. It's the salespeople. They keep putting all this pressure on us to put this through right now, and it's messing up our whole system. And that was the first time in my life where I realized, okay, it's a system. There's interconnected parts here that are interacting, and I had to go back into the system to fix, but the end result was I was able to get a hundred trucks through this gate in about 45 minutes instead of two hours, what we had done before.   0:24:18.8 Andrew Stotz: But it required a huge amount of work of going back and looking at the whole system. So the idea of looking at the science of improvement, as you mentioned, and the System of Profound Knowledge, it's... There's a whole process. Now, I wanna ask the question for the person who gets this book and they dig into it, it's not a small book. I've written some books, but all of 'em are small because I'm just, maybe I just can't get to this point. But this book is a big book, and it's got about 300... More than 300 pages. What's the promise? What are they gonna get from digging into this book? What are they gonna take away? What are they gonna be able to bring to their life and their business that they couldn't have done without really going deeper into this material?   0:24:57.7 Cliff Norman: Dave, go ahead.   0:25:01.4 Dave Williams: Well, I was gonna joke by saying they're gonna get hard work and only half because this is just the theory in the book and many of the... And sort of examples of the method. But we're in the process of preparing a field guide which is a much deeper companion guide loaded with exercises and examples of and more of the methods. So the original guide that that API had developed was actually about an eight... Well, I don't know how many pages it was, but it was a thick three inch binder. This, what you have there is us refining the content part that explains the theory and kind of gets you going. And then we moved all of the exercises and things to the field guide for people that really wanna get serious about it.   0:26:00.3 Dave Williams: And the reason I say hard work is that the one thing that you won't get, and you should probably pass it if this book if you're on Amazon, is you're not gonna get an easy answer. This is, as a matter of fact, one of the things that emerged in our early conversations about was this project worth it? Is to say that this is hard work. It's work that a very few number of leaders who or leadership teams that really want to learn and work hard and get results are gonna embark on. But for those, and many of our clients, I think are representative of that, of those people that say, gosh, I've been working really hard, and I feel like we could do better. I feel like I could make a bigger impact, or I could serve more customers or clients.   0:26:44.0 Dave Williams: And but I am... And I'm in intrigued or inspired or gotten to a certain point with improvement science on my own, but I want to figure out how to be more systematic and more global and holistic at that approach. Then that's what QOS is about. It builds on the shoulders of the other books that you mentioned, like The Improvement Guide which we talked about as being a great book about improvement, and improvement specifically in the context of a project. And other books like The Healthcare Data Guide and the Planned Experimentation, which are also about methods, healthcare Data Guide being about Shewhart charts, and Planned Experimentation being about factorial design. This book is about taking what Cliff described earlier as that... I always say it's that that diagram that people put on a slide and never talk about from Deming of production views as a system and saying, well, how would we do this if this is the model for adopting quality as strategy, what are the methods that help us to do this?   0:28:01.3 Dave Williams: And this book breaks that down into five activities that are built on the shoulders of profound knowledge, built on the shoulders of the science of improvement and provide a structure to be able to initially develop a system, a systems view of your organization, and then build on that by using that system to continually operate and improve that organization over time. So the book describes the activities. The book describes some of the things that go into getting started, including being becoming good at doing results-driven improvement, building a learning system, focusing in on the things that matter to your organization. And then working towards building the structure that you can improve upon. The book creates that foundation. It provides examples from clients and from people that we've worked with so that you can see what the theory looks like in practice get, kind of get a flavor for that. And we hope it builds on the shoulders of other work that I mentioned in the other books that compliment it and provides a starting point for teams that are interested in taking that journey.   0:29:26.5 Andrew Stotz: And Cliff, from your perspective, if somebody had no, I mean, I think, I think the Deming community's gonna really dive in and they're gonna know a lot of this stuff, but is gonna help them take it to the next level. But for someone who never had any real experience with Deming or anything like that, and they stumble upon this interview, this discussion, they hear about this book, can they get started right away with what's in this book? Or do they have to go back to foundations?   0:29:49.6 Cliff Norman: No, I think that can definitely get started. There's a lot of learning as you know, Andrew, from going through the four-day to understand things. And I think we've done a pretty good job of integrating what Dr. Deming taught us, as well as going with the methods. And one of the things people would tell him in his four-day seminars is, Dr. Deming, you've given us the theory, but we have no method here. And he said, well, if I have to give you the method, then you'll have to send me your check too. So he expected us to be smart enough to develop the methods. And the API folks did a really good job of translating that into what we call the five activities. So those five activities are to understand the purpose of the organization.   0:30:35.6 Cliff Norman: And a lot of people when they write a purpose, they'll put something up there but it's usually we love all our people. We love our customers even more. If only they didn't spend so much, and we'll come out with something like that and there'll be some pablum that they'll throw up on the wall. Well, this actually has some structure to it to get to Deming's ideas. And the first thing is let's try to understand what business we're in and what need we're serving in society that drives customers to us. So that word is used not need coming from customers, but what is it that drives them to us so we can understand that? And then the second part of that purpose needs to define the mainstay, the core processes, the delivery systems that relate directly to customers. And just those two ideas alone, just in the first activity of purpose, most people haven't thought about those ideas.   0:31:27.8 Cliff Norman: And can somebody pick up this book and do that? Yes. And that will answer a big challenge from Dr. Deming. Most people don't even know what business they're in, haven't even thought about it. And so that we... That question gets answered here, I think, very thoroughly. In this second activity, which is viewing the organization as a system contains two components that's viewing the organization as a system. And that's difficult to do, and a lot of people really don't see the need for it. Jane Norman reminded Dave and I on a call we did last week, that when you talk about a systems map with people, just ask 'em how do they know what's going on inside other organizations, other departments within their organization? How do they know that? And most of us are so siloed.   0:32:11.2 Cliff Norman: Somebody over here is doing the best job they can in department X, and meanwhile, department Y doesn't know anything about it. And then three months later the improvement shows up and all of a sudden there's problems now in department Y. Well, somebody who's focused on the organization as a system and sees how those processes are related when somebody comes to a management meeting said, well, we've just made a change here, and this is gonna show up over here in about three months, and you need to be prepared for that. Andrew, that conversation never takes place. So the idea of having the systems map and this book can help you get started on that. The second book that Dave was just talking about, there are more replete examples in there. I mean, we've got six case studies from clients in there than the practitioners and people who actually are gonna be doing this work.   0:33:01.7 Cliff Norman: That's gonna be absolutely... They're gonna need that field guide. And I think that's where Dave was coming from. The third activity is the information activity, how are we learning from outside the organization and how do we get feedback and research into the development of new products and services and the rest of it? And so we provided a system there. In fact, Dave took a lead on that chapter, and we've got several inputs there that have to be defined. And people just thinking through that and understanding that is huge. When Dr. Deming went to Japan in 1950, he was there to do the census to see how many Japanese were left after World War II. And then he got an invitation to come and talk to the top 50 industrialists. And he started asking questions and people from the Bank of Tokyo over there and all the rest of it.   0:33:52.4 Cliff Norman: And Dr. Deming says, well, do you have any problems? And they said, what do you mean? He says, well, do customers call up and complain? And he said, yes. And he says, well, do you have any data? And he said, no. He says, but if they complain, we give them a Geisha calendar. And then Dr. Deming says, well, how many Geisha calendars have you given out? So it's like, in 1991, I'm sitting here talking to a food company and I asked him, I said, well, you get customer complaints? Oh yeah. Do you have any data on it? No, but we give 'em a cookbook. I said, well, how many cookbooks are you giving out? So I was right back to where Deming was in 1950, so having the information activity, that third activity critical so that we're being proactive with it and not just reactive.   0:34:43.7 Cliff Norman: And so I think people can read through that and say, well, what are we doing right now? Well, I guess we're not doing this and move on. Then the fourth activity is absolutely critical. This is where you know that you've arrived, because now you're going to integrate not only the plan to operate, but a plan to improve. That becomes the business plan. For most people in business plan they do a strategy, and then they have a bunch of sub strategies, and they vote on what's important, and they do some other things, and then a year later they come back and revisit it. Well, what happens here is there's some strategic objectives that are laid out, and then immediately it comes down to, okay, what's gonna be designed and redesigned in this system? Which processes, products and services are gonna be designed? 'Cause we can all see it now, Andrew.   0:35:31.6 Andrew Stotz: Mm.   0:35:31.6 Cliff Norman: We can, it's right in front of us. So it's really easy to see at this point, and now we can start to prioritize and make that happen on purpose. As an example when Jane was a vice president at Conagra, they came up with five strategic objectives. Then they made a bunch of promises to corporate about what they were gonna do and when they were going to achieve it. When she laid out the systems map for them, they were horrified that over 30% of the processes that they needed to be having precooked meat didn't even exist. They were gonna have to be designed. And so Jane and I sat there and looking at 'em and said, well, if you'd had this map before you made the promises, would you have made those promises? No, no, we're in trouble right now. I gotta go back to the CEO of the holding company and tell 'em we're not gonna make it.   0:36:22.4 Cliff Norman: But there's a whole bunch of people that sit around in goal settings. We're gonna do this by when and have no idea about what they're talking about. So that's a little bit dangerous here. And then the fifth activity, it's probably the most important. And where I want people to start, I actually want 'em to start on the fifth activity, which is managing individual improvement activities, team activities. And what I mean by that is, nothing can hold you up from starting today on making an improvement and use the model for improvement. The three basic questions, you can write that on an envelope and apply it to a project and start right away. Because learning the habit of improvement, and when you identify, and this is typical in the planning process, again, a chapter that Dave took a lead on in the planning chapter.   0:37:03.8 Cliff Norman: When you lay that out, you're gonna come up with three to five strategic objectives, but that's gonna produce anywhere between 15 and 20 improvement efforts. And when people start three improvement efforts, and they see how difficult that is to traffic through an organization, particularly if you have a systems map, makes it a lot easier. If you don't have that, then there's all sorts of things that happen to you.   0:37:21.3 Andrew Stotz: Hmm.   0:37:22.8 Cliff Norman: But the, the idea of that all coming together is critical. And where you... Where that really shows up for the reader here is in chapter one. So Lloyd Provost took a lead on chapter one. If you read chapter one, you got a pretty good idea of what's gonna happen in the rest of the book. But more importantly, in that book, in chapter one, there's a survey at the end. And every time we give this out to people, they feel real bad.   0:37:48.1 Cliff Norman: And well, Cliff, any, on a scale of one to 10, we only came up with a four. Well, what I would tell 'em is, if you can come up with a four, you're pretty good. And those fundamentals have to be in place. In other words, the management needs to trust each other. There are certain things that have to be in place before you can even think about skating backwards here. And quality as an organizational strategy is all about skating backwards. The people who don't have the fundamentals can't even start to think about that.   0:38:15.0 Cliff Norman: So that survey and the gap between where they are at a four and where they're going to be at a 10, we've integrated throughout the whole book. So as you're reading through the whole book, you're seeing that gap, and then you have a good plan forward as to what do I need to do to get to be a six, an eight, and what do I need to do to finally arrive at a 10? Dave, why don't you add to what I just said there, and I gotta turn on a light here, I think.   0:38:39.2 Dave Williams: Well, I think one of the things that, and Cliff has probably been the one that has helped me appreciate this to the biggest degree is the role in which improvement plays in quality as an organizational strategy. So, I mean, I think in general, in our world, improvement is seen as kind of like a given, but in our case, what we've found is that many times people are not working on the things right in front of them or the problems in which they have, that they are on the hook... I like to say, are on the hook to get accomplished right now. And like Cliff mentioned, many of my clients when I engage with them, I say, well, what have you promised this year? And they'll give me a list and I'll say, well, okay, what are you working on to improve? And they'll be working on projects that are not related to that list of things that they've got to affect. And so usually that's a first pivot is to say, well, let's think about what are the things that you're working on or should be working on that are either designing or redesigning your system to achieve these strategic objectives.   0:39:48.8 Dave Williams: And the reason to put the attention on that fifth activity and get people working on improvement, there's a good chance that the improvement capability within the organization currently isn't to the level that you need it, where you can get results-driven projects happening at a clip that will enable you to chip away at 20 projects versus four in a year. And that it's not well integrated into the leadership, into the support structures that you have. In addition, if you're trying to use improvement on things that you're on the hook for, and Cliff noted, especially if you've got a system map while you're on that journey, you're gonna start to pick up on where the disconnects are. Similar to your example, Andrew, where you were describing your experience working backwards in the process, you're going to start to recognize, oh, I'm working on this, but it's linked to these other things. Or in order for me to do this, I need that. Or... And so that amplifies the project to be kind of just a vehicle to appreciate other things that are interconnected, that are important in improving our work together.   0:41:05.1 Dave Williams: And so I think that that's a critical piece. I mean, I sometimes describe it as the disappointment that people have when they open QOS because they want to have a new method or a new thing to work on. I said, well, there's a lot new in here. And at the same time, we want to build on the shoulders of the fundamentals. We want to build it because it's the fundamentals that are going to be able for you to activate the things that are necessary in order for you to skate backwards, like Cliff was describing earlier.   0:41:36.2 Cliff Norman: I got to add to what Dave was saying because this actually happened to me with a... I'm not going to mention the name of the company, but it's a high-tech companies worldwide. And we got up, a good friend of mine, Bruce Bowles, and we were introducing the idea of quality as an organizational strategy. And one of the guys in the front row, he says, Cliff, this just sounds like common sense, why aren't we all doing this? I said, that's a real good question. Let me put that in the parking lot here. So I put it up on a flip chart. And so we went through the idea of... We were working on Shewhart control charts. And so we showed him one of those. And at the end of all that, he raised his hand and I said, yeah, he says, Cliff, this is hard. I said, well, let me put that up here. This is hard. Then we went through the systems map and he says, look, this is hard. By the end of the two days, it was, this is hard, this is hard, this is hard, this is hard. This goes back to what Dave was saying earlier about once you open this page, there's some work that takes off, but more importantly, there's something new to learn here.   0:42:40.3 Cliff Norman: And that's frustrating to people, especially when they've got to quit doing what they've done in the past. It's what Deming says, you got to give up on the guilt and you got to move forward and transform your own thinking. So there's something here for the management to do. And if they're not willing to do that work, then this is probably not a good thing for them. Just go back to the blame flame and circling org charts and that kind of stuff and then wonder why we're losing money.   0:43:11.8 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, and I think that that's one of the things that we see in the Deming community is that, why are people doing it the way they are, dividing things up and doing KPIs and saying, you take care of that. And we're gonna optimize by focusing on each... We see how that all kind of falls apart.   0:43:27.9 Cliff Norman: It all falls through reductionism.   0:43:29.8 Andrew Stotz: [laughter] Yeah.   0:43:32.5 Cliff Norman: It doesn't understand the system, yeah.   0:43:32.5 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, so what I want to do now is I was just thinking about a book on my shelf called "Competitive Strategy" by Michael Porter. And there's a whole field of study in the area of strategy for businesses. Now you guys use, and you explain a little bit about the way you come up with... Why you come up with organization rather than let's say company as an example. But let's just talk about strategy for a moment. Generally we're taught in business school that there's two main strategies. One is a differentiation strategy. I like to teach my students like Starbucks. It's very differentiated from the old model. And you can have a low cost strategy, which is like McDonald's, where it's all about operational efficiency.   0:44:18.4 Andrew Stotz: And those are two different strategies that can get to the same goal, which is to build a strong and sustainable business that's making a good profit for the employees to get paid well and for shareholders. And so for somebody that understands some of the foundations of typical strategy, it's hard for them to think, wait, wait, wait, what? You're just talking about just better quality is the strategy? How should they frame this concept of quality as a strategy in relation to what we've been taught about low cost and differentiation and other types of strategy? How do we think about this book in relation to that?   0:45:03.2 Cliff Norman: When Deming wrote his book, his very first one of the four "Out of the Crisis", which was the whole idea about quality and competitive position. But he was kind of answering that. And at that time, what we had is we had three companies in the United States that were going at each other, Ford, GM, and Chrysler. And they'd call each other up, well, what are you doing this year? Oh, we're making cars that don't work. Sometimes they break down. That's why we have Mr. Goodwrench to repair them. That's an extra revenue source for us. As one of the executives that are challenged, a colleague of mine, he said, you don't realize how much money we're gonna lose here taking the repair business out because we make a lot of money out of repair. So making cars that don't work has been a good revenue stream for us. Well, all that works out great, until somebody shows up like Toyota that has a car that works and doesn't need to be repaired by Mr. Goodwrench all the time.   0:45:58.8 Cliff Norman: So the mind shift there, and what Dr. Deming was saying is that he was focused on the competition's already licked. And I don't think Porter's thought about that very much, not to be overly critical, because I'm an admirer of his, but the idea of focusing on the need and why is that customer coming to us so that we make a journey, and the Japanese call that being in the Gemba, being in the presence with the customers as they use the product or service and doing the research and the rest of it. And then coming back and then redesign that product or service so that it not only grabs the current customer, but we start thinking about customers that are not even our customers and innovate and actually come up with a design that actually brings new customers to us through products and services that we haven't thought about yet. So if I show you three products just to make a picture of it, we often show like an abacus, which was a hand calculating machine about BC. Then there's a slide rule that came out about the same year that Columbus discovered America. And that was good till about 1968.   0:47:06.0 Cliff Norman: And then the calculator, the handheld calculator came out. Well the need for all three of those products is to do handheld calculations. So we've had that need since BC. Now in 1967, K&E Calculator was making that slide rule, which I used in junior high school. If you'd have come up to me and said, Cliff, what do you need in the way of a better slide rule? I said, well can you get me a holster for it? 'Cause I don't like having to stick me in the face. I put it in my pocket and it sticks me in the face. And if you can give me a holster for that, that would be my view of that. I wasn't about to come up with the TI calculator. That wasn't gonna happen. Not from Cliff. It's gonna come from an engineer at TI. Now, K&E Calculator, if they'd been doing research in the marketplace and saying, is there something that can totally disrupt us going on here? Rather than just looking at figuring out a way to make the K&E slide rule better, they might've discovered that.   0:48:07.0 Cliff Norman: Most people don't do that. They just go back. They just lose their business. And it was interesting in '67, their annual report put out, what's the world gonna look like 100 years from now? So they had dome cities, they had cars flying, they had all sorts of things going on that were great innovations, but they didn't have the TI calculator in there, along with the HP calculator. And that wiped out their business. And so if people understand the need, and that's what Dr. Deming is getting at, he says, they really haven't thought about what business they're in. So why are the customers coming to us? He says, no customer ever asked for pneumatic tire. No customer ever asked for a microwave oven. That came from people with knowledge that were looking at how the customers are using the current products and services and say, now, is there technology innovation going on that we can actually do a better job of providing a better match in the future?   0:48:56.9 Andrew Stotz: And can you explain why you use the word need as opposed to want?   0:49:06.5 Cliff Norman: That's a good question. The idea is that there's a need that's constant in society. So that need of having to do handheld calculations or needing healthcare or to pay bills, that need is constant throughout civilization. And so if I want something that's interesting, that might be the match. That might be something to do with some features what I'm offering and so forth. I'd like to have this, I'd like to have that. But the need and the way we're using that is it doesn't come from customers. It's what drives customers to us. And it's always been there. It's always been there. Need for transportation, for example. Whether you're walking or driving a bicycle or a car or a plane.   0:49:53.6 Andrew Stotz: And Dave, how would you answer the same question when you think about a person running a business and they've had many strategy meetings in their business, they've set their corporate strategy of what we're doing, where we're going and that type of thing. And maybe they've picked, we're gonna be a low cost producer. Thailand's an interesting one because Thailand had a ability to be low cost producers in the past. And then China came along and became the ultimate low cost producer. And all of a sudden, Thai companies had a harder time getting the economies of scale and the like. And now the Chinese manufacturers are just really coming into Thailand, into the Thai market. And now it's like, for a Thai company to become a low cost leader is almost impossible given the scale that China and the skills that they have in that. And so therefore, they're looking at things like I've got to figure out how to get a better brand. I've got to figure out how to differentiate and that type of thing. How does this... How could this help a place like that and a management team that is struggling and stuck and is looking for answers?   0:51:07.0 Dave Williams: Well, I go back to what Cliff said about that many organizations don't pause to ask, why do they exist? What is the need of which they are trying to fulfill? Much of my background involved working in the service industry, initially with public safety and ambulance systems and fire systems, and then later in healthcare and in education. And in many of those environments, especially in places where in public systems where they've been built and they may have existed for a long time, when you ask them about what are they trying to accomplish as an organization or what is it that they... The need that they're trying to fulfill? Typically, they're gonna come back to you with requests or desires or wants or sort of characteristics or outcomes that people say they expect, but they don't pause to ask, like, well, what is the actual thing of which I'm trying to tackle? And Cliff mentioned like, and we actually, I should mention in the book, we have a list of different strategies, different types of strategies, all the different ones that you mentioned, like price and raw material or distribution style or platform or technology.   0:52:30.9 Dave Williams: There's different types of strategies, and the one that we are focusing in on is quality. But I think it's important for people to ask the question. Cliff mentioned transportation. There's a number of different great examples, actually, I think in transportation, where you could look at that as being an ongoing need as Cliff mentioned from the days when there was no technology and we were all on foot to our current day. Transportation has been a need that existed and many different things over time have been created from bicycles, probably one of the most efficient technologies to transport somebody, wheels and carts. And now, and you were referencing, we've made reference to the car industry. It's a fascinating experience going on of the car world and gas versus electric, high technology versus not, autonomous vehicles. There's, and all of them are trying to ask the question of, are there different ways in which I might be able to leverage technology to achieve this need of getting from point A to point B and be more useful and potentially disrupt in the marketplace? And so I think the critical thing initially is to go back and ask and learn and appreciate what is that need?   0:53:58.6 Dave Williams: And then think about your own products and services in relation to that. And I think we include four questions in the book to be able to kind of think about the need. And one of those questions is also, what are other ways in which you could fulfill that need? What are other ways that somebody could get transportation or do learning or to help sort of break you away from just thinking about your own product as well? And that's useful because it's super tied to the system question, right? Of, well, this is the need that we're trying to fulfill and these are the products and services that are matching that need. Then the system that we have is about, we need to build that and design that in order to produce, not only produce the products and services that match that need, but also continually improve that system to either improve those products and services or add or subtract products and services to keep matching the need and keep being competitive or keep being relevant. And maybe if it's not in a competitive environment where you're gonna go out of business, at least be relevant in terms of the city service or community service, government service that continues to be there to match the need of the constituents. So I think it's a really important piece.   0:55:17.0 Dave Williams: It's that North star of saying, providing a direction for everything else. And going back to your original comment or question about strategy, and many times people jump to a strategy or strategies or, and those might be more around particular objectives or outcomes that they're trying to get to. It may not actually be about the method or the approach like cost or technology that they may not even think that way. They may be more thinking about a plan. And I really encourage people to be clear about what they're trying to accomplish and then start to ask, well, how's the system built for that? And later we can bring a process that'll help us learn about our system and learn about closing that gap.   0:56:05.1 Cliff Norman: Yeah. Just what I'd add to that, Andrew, because you mentioned China, a few other countries, but I think the days are coming to an end fairly quickly where somebody can say, oh, we can go to this country. They have low wages, we'll put our plant there and all that. There's a lot of pushback on that, particularly in the United States. And if that's your strategy, that hadn't required a lot of thinking to say the least. But in 1966, over 50% of the countries in the world were, let me rephrase that, over 50% of the population of the world lived in extreme poverty. So there were a lot of targets to pick out where you want to put your manufacturing. And in 2017, and you and Dave were probably like me. I didn't see this hit the news, but that figure had been reduced from over 50% down to 9%. And all you have to do is just, and I worked in China a lot, they're becoming very affluent. And as they become very affluent, that means wages are going up and all the things that we want to see throughout the world. And the whole essence of this book is to focus on the quality of the organization and the design and redesign of a system to a better job of matching the need and cause that chain reaction to go off. When Jane and I went over to work in Sweden, Sven Oloff who ran three hospitals and 62 dental clinics there and also managed the cultural activities and young shipping. He said, Cliff, I report to 81 politicians. I don't wanna have to go to them to put a bond on an election to get more money for my healthcare system, I wanna use Dr. Deming's chain reaction here to improve care to the patients in my county and also reduce our costs. A whole bunch of people that don't even believe that's possible in healthcare.   0:58:39.9 Cliff Norman: But that's what Sven Oloff said that's what you're here for. And that's what we proceeded to do, they launched about 350 projects to do just that, and one of their doctors, Dr. Motz [?], he's amazing. We taught him a systems map, I came back two months later, and he had them in his hospital on display. And I said, Motz, how did you do this? He said well Cliff, I'm an endocrinologist by education as a doctor, of course, that's a person who understands internal systems in the body. So he said the systems approach was a natural for me. But I'd like to say it was that easy for everybody else, that systems map idea and as you know, being in the Deming seminar, that's quite a challenge to move from viewing the organization as an org chart, which has been around since Moses father-in-law told him, you need to break up the work here a little bit, and the tens of tens reporting to each other, and then of course, the Romans took that to a grander scale, and so a centurion soldier had 100 other soldiers reporting to him. So we've had org charts long and our federal government took that to a whole new level.   0:59:46.1 Cliff Norman: But the idea is switching off the org chart from biblical times to actually getting it up to Burt [?] about 1935 and understanding a system that's kind of a nose bleed in terms of how much we're traveling there to get us into the 21st century here.   1:00:04.0 Andrew Stotz: And I left Ohio, I grew up outside of Cleveland, and I left Ohio in about 1985, roughly. And it was still a working class, Cleveland had a huge number of jobs and there was factories and all that, and then I went to California, and then I moved to Thailand in 1992. So when I go back to Ohio now, many years later, decades later, it's like a hollowed out place, and I think about what you're saying is... And what's going on in the world right now is that I think there's a desire in America to bring back manufacturing to bring back production and all of that, and that's a very, very hard challenge, particularly if it's gone for a while and the skill sets aren't there, maybe the education system isn't there, I talk a lot with John Dues here on the show about the what's happening in education and it's terrifying.   1:01:05.9 Andrew Stotz: So how could this be... Book be a guide for helping people that are saying, we've got to revitalize American production and manufacturing and some of these foundational businesses and not just services, which are great. How can this book be a guide?   1:01:25.8 Dave Williams: One thing I would say that I think is interesting about our times, many times when I reflect on some of the examples that you just provided, I think about how changes were made in systems without thinking about the whole system together. And there may have been changes at various times that we're pursuing particular strategies or particular approaches, so it may have been the low-cost strategy, it may have been to disrupt a marketplace. And oftentimes, they don't think about... When somebody's pursuing one particular view, they may miss other views that are important to have an holistic perspective. One of the things that I appreciate about QoS in the methods and overall as a holistic view of looking at organizations that it's asking us to really think initially about that North Star, what we're trying to do, our purpose, and what are the tenants. What are the things that are important us, the values...   1:02:38.7 Dave Williams: That are important to us in pursuing that particular purpose? And in doing that, really thinking about how does the system work as it is today, and if we make changes, how does it move in alignment with the values that we have and in the direction that we wanna go? And appreciating, I would say, part of the value of the scientific thinking that is in the Science of Improvement is that it encourages you to try to see what happens and appreciate not only what happens in relation to the direction you're trying to go, but also the... Have a balanced view of looking at the collateral effects of things that you do, and I think that systems do is really important there. So I think from that perspective, the quality as an organizational strategy brings a holistic picture into these organizations, or at least...   1:03:45.1 Dave Williams: To be paying attention to the system that you have, maybe the direction you wanna go, and what happens as you... What are your predictions and what do you see when you study the results of making changes in the direction of the vision that you have. And I think that's at a high level that is one of the ways that I think about it. Cliff, how would you add on there?   1:04:09.1 Cliff Norman: Your question made me think of something that happened about two years ago, Jane and I got a call from a lady that worked for her in one of the chicken plants, and she said, Jane, I had to call you because I need to order some of those Shewhart charts. But what happened today, you should have been here and Jane said, what... She said, Remember that 10 year thing we buried in the ground that we're gonna open up in 10 years, and she said, yeah, said, well, we opened it up today, and the new plant manager was here, and those Shewhart charts came out, and he looked at the costs on them. He said, you were operating at this level? She said, yeah, routinely. And he said what happened? He said, well, they had new management come in and they got rid of the charts, that's the first thing they did, and then gradually they try to manage things like they normally did, and then they forgot everything that we had learned. And that's kind of where we are right now.   1:05:11.0 Cliff Norman: So just think of that a decade goes by, and it just as Dr. Deming said, there's nothing worse than the mobility of management, it's like getting AIDS in the system. And they basically destroyed their ability to run a low-cost operation in an industry that runs on 1 or 2%. And when you watch that happen and understand that we still have food companies in this country, and we have to start there and start looking at the system anew and start thinking about how it can actually cause that chain reaction to take off, and that comes from focusing on quality of the system. And then as Dr. Deming says, anybody that's ever worked for a living knows why costs go down with two words less rework, but instead of people will put in extra departments to handle the rework. Next thing they start building departments to handle...   1:06:01.8 Cliff Norman: The stuff that's not working because the system they don't understand. So that was a... What do they call those things, Dave, where they put them in the ground and pull him out?   1:06:11.0 Dave Williams: Time capsule.   1:06:13.4 Andrew Stotz: Time capsule yeah.   1:06:13.5 Cliff Norman: Yeah. Time capsule. The a 10-year time capsule.   1:06:19.2 Andrew Stotz: It's a great, great story. And a great idea. We had a company in Thailand a very large company that the CEO of it came upon the idea of the teachings of Dr. Deming and over time, as he implemented it in his company, the Japanese Union of Scientists have their prize and his company won that prize and then he had about 10 subsidiary companies that also were doing it and they also won over time. And so Thailand is actually is the second largest recipient of the Japanese Deming Award outside of India. But he left and he retired and another guy took over, a very bright guy and all that, but he threw most of that out and focused on newer methods like KPIs and things like that. And just at the end of last year, maybe six months ago, they reported a pretty significant loss, and I was kind of made me think how we can spend all this time getting the Deming teachings into our business, and then one little change in management and it's done.   1:07:26.9 Andrew Stotz: And that made me think, oh, well, that's the value of the book, in the sense that it's about building the concept of quality as a core part of strategy as opposed to just a tool or a way of thinking that could go out of the company as soon as someone else comes in. Go ahead, Dave.   1:07:41.9 Dave Williams: I was gonna say, Andrew, you raise a point, I think it's really, really important and Cliff mentioned this in terms of the problem of mobility of management. One thing that I don't know that we outline probably in dark enough ink in the book is the critically important piece of leadership, building the structures and the capability. I know we talk a little bit about it, but doing it in a way that both builds up the people that you have... So Cliff emphasizes this a lot in terms of like those early improvement projects, we wanna try to pick the up and coming leaders and build their capability and get them working on important projects and help them learn how to build management a project or an effort to results that those are gonna be the ideal people that we want in the future, and this system is gonna build a learning system that's really powerful. But it requires some deliberateness to keep that going, and there are example after example of organizations who have gone down the quality journey because of a particular leader, and then that leader moved on and maybe in... Sometimes quickly, sometimes over time, those organizations...   1:09:20.1 Dave Williams: Revert back to traditional approaches. And I think that is an important consideration when you're thinking about going down this journey, is not only how do you create the quality as an organizational strategy, how do you build that structure and build the team and the people around it. But also how do you be really really thoughtful about continuing to recruit the right people, continuing to build their capabilities, and when it comes time, and it really, very natural there are gonna be leaders who either maybe they're in a role and they now wanna go off and lead another organization, that's exciting.   1:09:58.1 Dave Williams: I wanna celebrate our creating talent that might be able to blossom out in the world, or there are people that wanna retire, or are there people that... Any number of things that may happen that require transition. How do we make sure that when those transitions in leadership happen, that we then fill their shoes with people that keep that learning and approach and strategy going forward? And I think that's a really, really important consideration in any of these, and I think each of us could probably rattle off five or 10 companies that were... Organizations that were recognized for their quality or their results 10, 15 years ago, that today are not, and one of the reasons might be, or is likely that there was a transition in the chief executive or the leadership team, and that wasn't sustained. And I think that's a really critical aspect of building an organization around quality as a strategy, but making it be the way that it continues to go forward. How would you build on that...   1:11:04.9 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. Cliff I'm curious, how would you say you contribute to the continuity of quality in the organization from this book?   1:11:15.9 Cliff Norman: Let me... I'm gonna build on what Dave just said, right there. Because the people component to this is critically important, and we have a chapter dedicated, chapter 10, and one of the things that often comes out every year is a annual Gallup Survey that shows the low number of people that are actually engaged in work. And that made Jane and I particularly think about that as we work with our clients, that they actually enjoy making improvements and making contributions. We had a group of nurses and doctors that were brought into a team up in Wisconsin, and they just stared at each other across the land, there was no trust in the room or anything else. And we started working with them just use the model for improvement, have them focus on a project, we did some things with what we call the strength deployment inventory, so they can understand each other. And we got over some of the barriers and the rest of it, but this one lady in there was just adamant on the first day, this wasn't gonna happen. We don't trust them. We got all these issues going on and Cliff, we don't have time for this.   1:12:14.4 Cliff Norman: Well, at the end of three months, Jane drug them over the finish line with a real improvement, and I'm on the call, they have me come back on the call and she said, Jane, we have three more improvements we need to do now. And I said, wait a minute, Betty, I thought you didn't have time for this. Says, "Cliff, will you shut up? We're having fun." I love that take off, and it's not that apparent in many organizations, but people wanna contribute, and this provides a system to make sure that that happens, they get a role statement, it connects them to the purpose of the organization, it tells them which processes that they can work in and change, what people externally and internally, that they're going to be able to relate to. They don't have to run around asking for permission. When you unleash that in the organization, you have a whole bunch of opportunities to find gold mines laying all over the place that need to be looked at, and most organizations aren't doing that. As Dr. Deming would say the answers I'm giving you here, you haven't even thought of the questions. And I think that's where this book takes it, is it forces you to answer those questions and come up with those answers. But the engagements here, Dave, you just reminded me of that is so critically important because that comes riding in with this is an unintended consequence, I don't know how my times I've seen it in people, thousands of times. So...   1:13:36.7 Dave Williams: I always tell leaders, when an employee applies to your organization and shows up on their first day, they're hoping this is their dream job, this is the one. And if six months later, they don't show that same enthusiasm and engagement and intrigue, that's what your organization did to them over time. They showed you their true selves when they show up to interview. And it's so true, and it's so unfortunate, and I agree with Cliff, I always feel sad for folks that don't look at work as being something to enjoy. I think, especially the more that I've been involved in thinking about quality as an organizational strategy. I think any type of business or any type of organization can be a joyful place to work for the right people, it just needs to be a place that's focused on enabling people to do their best work in the right way, in the direction of serving their clients and customers. And I think that's...   1:14:37.5 Andrew Stotz: So Cliff...   1:14:40.2 Dave Williams: The value anywhere.   1:14:40.3 Andrew Stotz: Cliff why don't you wrap this up?   1:14:43.5 Cliff Norman: Andrew, I don't even remember this diagram, but Deming actually had a picture of it, and I think it was in "Out of the Crisis" called the Forces of Destruction, that starts when you're in kindergarten, then just goes up from there once you go to work. It just constantly growing... To where you lose that intrinsic motivation and this, I think really... It just absolutely unleashes it in the organization. So I think that's a big answer to your, probably your first question to us.   1:15:14.5 Andrew Stotz: Right. I think that's a great wrap-up, and it's really been wonderful to talk to both you guys and congratulations on getting this out to the world. And for the listeners and the viewers out there that you can go to Amazon has a starting point, number one, that's where I got mine, and it was at my door step, not very... Not many days afterwards, so I really encourage everybody to go out there and start to really think... See how this is plugging some of the gap of what Dr. Deming was saying, I'm gonna go back to Dr. Deming's first point of his 14 Points, and that is create constancy of purpose towards improvement of product and service with the aim to become competitive and stay in business and to provide jobs. Any last words from you guys?   1:16:00.2 Cliff Norman: No, we appreciate the invitation, Andrew. Appreciate the good questions, appreciate your time.   1:16:05.2 Dave Williams: Yeah, same here Andrew. Thank you very much for inviting us to be part of the Deming podcast, and it's a pleasure to be able to share this work with this great community. And we're grateful for your time.   1:16:18.1 Andrew Stotz: Well, I appreciate it myself, and I know for both of you guys, on behalf of the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this incredible discussion and all of your hard work that you've done to get to this point with this particular book of the many things that you guys have done. And for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'm gonna leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, and we just heard it earlier out of the speaking of these two gentlemen, Dave and Cliff, and that is people are entitled to joy in work.

Everyone is in favor of improving quality, but what does that mean? In this episode Bill Bellows and Andrew Stotz discuss stories of meeting requirements, missing the mark, and what Dr. Deming said about how to do better. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussions with Bill 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. And I guess now that we're into 2025, it's gonna be 32 years pretty soon. The episode for today is episode 10, are you in favor of quality? Bill, take it away.   0:00:33.5 Bill Bellows: Thank you, Andrew, and Happy New Year.   0:00:35.1 Andrew Stotz: Happy New Year.   0:00:36.4 Bill Bellows: Happy New Year to our listeners. And yeah, so here we are episode 10 of Misunderstanding Quality. We got up to 22 episodes in our first series and then we'll have a follow-on series. One is I would like to thank those who took the invite to reach out to me on LinkedIn. And I've just started connecting with a few new people who are doing some interesting things involved in types of work that I'm not familiar with, it's just fascinating to listen to the types of issues they deal with. And they each come to me with an interest in Dr. Deming's work. So they're following the podcast series, this one, the others that you're doing, and they listen to all of them. And I'm not sure if they've contacted the others, but they've reached out to me. So I wanna once again say for those of you that are enjoying this conversation, my conversation with you, Andrew, then please reach out to me.   0:01:50.0 Bill Bellows: If you'd like to know more, that's one thing. The last episode was called Worse Than a Thief. And one thing I wanna mention, there's a bunch of meanings relative to being worse than a thief. One distinctly from Dr. Taguchi was... And I don't... He gave examples of manufacturers that made plastic sheeting for crops to protect the crops and his complaint was that they made it to the minimum side of the requirement. So there was a requirement on the thickness, so again, even if you have a 1mil thick here, we have in the States, there's you can buy plastic 1mil, which is 0.001 inch or something heavier. And so, and obviously, in the world of manufacturing, you're not gonna get exactly 0.001, it's gonna be a little low, a little high. So what Dr. Taguchi was referencing is companies in Japan that were making plastic sheeting that would be used for a number of things. But in particular, he talked about it, what if it's being used to protect crops?   0:03:19.8 Bill Bellows: And what if the manufacturers, to save money because they're buying the plastic by the pound, selling it by the yard, so they're gonna make it as thin as possible. And his concern was, so how much are you saving to make it as thin as possible? And what is the impact of being on the thin side when a crop is lost? And that was his reference to being worse than a thief, that you're saving a few pennies but costing the farmer the... Right? And so that could be... So that's a situation where there's a requirement, the requirement is met minimally. You and I reference that as leaving the bowling ball in the doorway, delivering to the absolute minimum, or I mean delivering to the minimum, the maximum of the requirement, whatever best suits me. So if I'm delivering to you a term paper and you as the professor say, "It must be between five and 10 pages," and I say, "Well, I'm gonna make it five pages."   0:04:23.9 Bill Bellows: If in another situation, [chuckle] an example, I guess is if when our daughter was in high school and we said, "Allison, make sure you're home between 10:00 and midnight," then she may move that to the high side of the tolerance and come home at 10:00 or 11:59. But in either case, what Taguchi is referencing is in the world of acceptability, the requirements have been met. But the worse than a thief aspect is, is what is the personal gain versus the impact to others in the system. So that could be picking up the nail in the parking lot or deciding not to do it. So I just wanna point out that I see that as a very broad statement, not just in terms of meeting requirements, but within your organization are you... To what degree are you focusing on your department at the detriment of the organization? That's another way of being worse than a thief.   0:05:28.7 Bill Bellows: It could be you're spending all of your budget just before the end of the year. 'Cause you know what happens, Andrew, if you don't spend all of your budget.   0:05:38.0 Andrew Stotz: Gonna get taken away.   0:05:38.9 Bill Bellows: So if you're 10 percent under, the next year you're gonna get 10% less. So I used to kid people is, so what will I spend... Again, so you learn the hard way, if you don't spend the entire budget then your boss the next year says, "Well, Andrew, you only spent 80% of the budget, so we're only gonna give you 80% of last year." So what's the... What message does Andrew learn? I tell people is you go a little bit over the 100%, right? You go a little bit over. And so even that I would say is worse than a thief 'cause what are you doing? You're withholding your resources that others may find. So I just wanna say that that statement is not as narrow as looking at a set of requirements, it is looking at things from what's good for me versus good for the system. All right, have fun to that one.   0:06:30.0 Andrew Stotz: Right.   0:06:31.0 Bill Bellows: So relative to the title you mentioned. Are you in favor of quality? What inspired that? There's another thing I've been looking at recently, whether on LinkedIn or elsewhere on the internet. I'm a member of ASQ, the American Society for Quality, so I get regular notes from them. And I go off and look, and I'm just reminded of how most organizations think about quality, which is meeting requirements, and it could be much more than that. But anyway, in The New Economics, Dr. Deming's book, first edition, came out in 1993. In there in the first chapter, he says, let me pull it up, and I wanna read it exactly from the good doctor.   Near the end of chapter one of the New Economics, Dr. Deming, in bold text, our listeners will find a statement, “a look at some of the usual suggestions for improvement of quality.” And Dr. Deming says, "There's widespread interest in quality. Suppose that we were to conduct next Tuesday a national referendum with the question, are you in favor of improvement of quality? Yes or no? The results." predicted Dr. Deming "would show, I believe," and again, I'm quoting Deming, "an avalanche in favor of quality. Moreover, unfortunately, almost everybody has the answer on how to achieve it. Just read the letters to the editor, speeches, books. It seems so simple. Here are some of the answers offered, all insufficient, some even negative in results."   0:09:17.9 Bill Bellows: "Automation, new machinery, more computers, gadgets, hard work, best efforts, merit system, annual appraisal, make everybody accountable, MBO, management by objective as practiced, MBR, management by results." And I'll just pause. Dr. Deming, when he would read this list in a seminar, would also make reference to MBIR, management by imposition of results. All right, back to Dr. Deming. "Rank people, rank teams, rank divisions, rank salesmen, reward them at the top, punish them at the bottom. More SQC, statistical quality control, more inspection, establish an office of quality, appoint someone as VP in charge of quality, incentive pay, work standards," in parentheses, "quotas," comma, "time standards," end quote. "Zero defects, meet specifications, motivate people." And then in bold print, Dr. Deming adds, "What is wrong with these suggestions?" He says, "the fallacy of the suggestions listed above will be obvious from subsequent pages of the text," meaning The New Economics.   0:10:36.1 Bill Bellows: "Every one of them ducks the responsibility of management," Andrew. "A company that advertised that the future belongs to him that invest in it, and thereupon proceeded to invest heavily," 40 million, no, 40 billion, I'm sorry, that's ten to the ninth. "40 billion in new machinery and automation, results, trouble, overcapacity, high cost, low quality. It must be said in defense of the management that they obviously had faith in the future." And I asked some people that knew Dr. Deming far better than me. Once upon a time, I said, "So who was Dr. Deming talking about, the company that invested $40 billion?" He said, "Oh, that was General Motors." And I used to think when I was at Rocketdyne that you could not ask for a better competitor than one that would invest $40 billion to lose market share, right? Talk about self-inflicted gunshot wounds that they're gonna go off, invest heavily in technology gadgets. That's what Dr. Deming's calling 'em, gadgets.   0:11:55.2 Andrew Stotz: Gadgets.   0:11:55.8 Bill Bellows: Did you ever hear what Dr. Deming said about, he says, there's a couple of things he said. This is one of the things I heard him say live. He said, "Where's the data in the computer? Gone forever." And then he'd say, "the hardest thing in all the world to find..." You know what he said, Andrew, was the hardest thing in all the world to find?   0:12:24.0 Andrew Stotz: No, what was that?   0:12:27.3 Bill Bellows: "A piece of paper and a pencil." 'Cause his mindset was just put the data that you wanna plot on a piece of paper, as opposed to in the computer, gone forever. Now, I worked with a company as a consultant for three years. And one of the first things they had me work on, of course, was trying to learn about a problem that happened a few years earlier. A problem, meaning something that did not conform to requirements. And in the middle of working on that for about three months and working on that, and the issue was, let's learn about what happened a couple of years ago so it doesn't happen again. And what happened a few years ago was a very stringent set of requirements for this aerospace hardware, missed the requirement by 10%. It was close. It was close, but the customer would not buy it. And it was a multimillion dollar asset that they held onto 'cause they were hoping they can convince the customer to buy it. And the customer just said, "You keep it, you keep it." So the issue was, "Come over and help us understand what happened. We don't do that again."   0:13:54.1 Bill Bellows: Well, in the midst of that, the same product being produced a few months later, instead of missing the requirement by about 10%, missed the requirement by about 70%.   0:14:12.9 Andrew Stotz: Oh.   0:14:13.2 Bill Bellows: Oh, oh. It was a nightmare. And the company spent a whole lot of money chasing that. In the long run, it may have been a bad test. We never found exactly what it was. And when I caught up with them years later, they eventually went back into production. But the reason I bring that up is, after the incident, I was called over. It was a very intense time to go figure out what's going on, only to find out that the data was in a computer. So, the data was not being plotted real time. So after the incident, one of the things that happened within a few days of the incident was to go back and plot the data. So when I was in a meeting and they showed the data and I knew what they were saying was they had pulled it out of the computer. I thought, "Dr. Deming's not kidding. Where's the data, in the computer? Gone forever." So I wanted to...   0:15:23.8 Andrew Stotz: I had something I wanted to add to that, and that is I have a couple of great classic pictures in our family that were made 100 years, 120 years ago.   0:15:36.8 Bill Bellows: Oh wow. Lucky you.   0:15:39.9 Andrew Stotz: Great grandma, those old, really old pictures. And I was just showing them to my, to some of the ladies that take care of my mom and they just can't. And I said, "Now think about all the improvements that have been done in photography. What is the chance that one out of your 10,000 pictures on your iPhone that you've taken is going to survive 120 years like this picture?" And the answer is zero. There's zero chance.   0:16:14.4 Bill Bellows: That's right. Because even if you have kids, they don't want 4000 photos then... 4000...   0:16:25.0 Andrew Stotz: Nobody can deal with that.   0:16:26.4 Bill Bellows: No one could... You're absolutely right. They will not. Unless that photo is printed and turned into a keepsake. Gone forever.   0:16:38.7 Andrew Stotz: Yeah.   0:16:39.0 Bill Bellows: Yeah. No, that's a good point. That's a very... And the fact that these photos lasted that long is pretty damn amazing.   0:16:47.2 Andrew Stotz: Well, there's a great book. I forgot the name of it, but I'll remember it. There's a great book about how slow this... The pace. It's called "Future Hype" is the name of it. It's all about the slow pace of innovation. And this is a great example. Going from no photo to a great photo 120 years ago was true innovation.   0:17:12.0 Bill Bellows: Oh, yeah. Yes.   0:17:13.8 Andrew Stotz: Just coming up with ways to do thousands of photos. And the author just basically crushes everything that you think is innovation. That there's millions of patents now that are coming out. We're much more innovative than we were in the past. And then his whole point is, "Yeah, and go and look at them, and what you see is that they've changed the color a little bit, they've changed this, they've changed that, and they're just doing modifications." So, every single area that you think there is innovation. And I think that's part of what Dr. Deming's talking about, about it's in the computer that doesn't. Tools and gadgets don't solve the problem.   0:17:56.1 Bill Bellows: No, it's... Well, they are tools. And as we've talked about in this series, in the first series, there are tools and techniques. Cell phones, computers, automobiles. These are tools. Techniques are how to use them. And tools, to borrow from Ackoff, are about efficiency, doing things well. But not to be confused with effectiveness, also from Ackoff, which is doing the right thing. And what I admire... I think what we both admire about Dr. Deming's work is the ability of the System of Profound Knowledge to provoke the question of whether or not something is... Doing something is worthwhile to do. And that has to do with not doing things faster, but stepping back and asking, "Why am I doing this in the first place?" Dr. Deming talked about. I think he used to say... He phrased it as, be, Dr. Deming saying, "Andrew, do you know how companies make toast?" And Andrew says, "No, Dr. Deming, how do companies make toast?" You ever hear that?   0:19:16.0 Andrew Stotz: No.   0:19:17.1 Bill Bellows: He says, "First, they burn it, then they scrape it." [laughter] And so what I see in organizations is the people who make the toast pass it off to the next person who does the inspection, and then upon the inspection, is sent to the toast scraper, then the toast scraper scrapes the toast and then sends it to somebody else, which could be a second toasting. [laughter] And then on to the next. And the person who makes the toast in the first place is none the wiser that X percent of the toast, they're just passing it on and so the technology is used to speed that up. And what's not happening is some type of feedback on adjusting the controls. It's just, it's... And this is what I saw when I worked in Connecticut, was immense toast scraping. Oh, it was just phenomenal. We had a machine making these plates for a heat exchanger for the Army's current main engine battle tank. A 1500 horsepower gas turbine engine. And half the volume, Andrew, of the tank is a heat exchanger to capture the exhaust heat to preheat the compressed air to improve the fuel economy.   0:20:52.4 Bill Bellows: Even when half the volume of the tank engine is a heat exchanger to capture every ounce of excess energy and convert it back to the efficiency of the engine. Even with that, the fuel economy of the Army's today main battle tank is measured in gallons per mile 'cause it drinks gasoline. Now, it's phenomenal performance. But they can't move too fast to outrun the tankers. So, these heat exchanger plates have, in the original design, I'm not sure what design is nowadays, had roughly 2 miles of welding in the heat exchanger. And the welding was what's known as resistance welding. And these very, very thin plates were welded together with a little dot of current to melt the metal to create a little bead, and then another one on, and they were overlapping melts, and that created a seam. And after these plates were welded together, you know, two together, each of them was put on to this under a bright light, a literally a Lazy Susan.   0:22:11.0 Bill Bellows: This thing had a 27 inch outer diameter and there'd be a bead around the outside and a bead around the inside. Two different diameters. And on a given plate one inspector would look under a magnifying glass to see, are there any gaps in the beads? And then flip it over and look at the other side, and then hand off to the next person to look at the same plate again.   0:22:37.1 Bill Bellows: So, every plate was 200% inspected. There were 10 machines making these plates. There was no traceability from the inspector. All the problems might have been coming from machine number one. There was no such awareness. And so, after the inspector, "I found a quarter of an inch where you... " "Okay. Then we send it to Andrew for a re-weld." There's no feedback and is that system any better today? I'm aware of systems today that are very similar to that. So, anyway, that's what Deming's talking about relative to the... Yeah. How do companies make toast? Well, the other thing I want to jump to, relative to this "Are you in favor of quality?" Which got it on my one is, I thought, is something really neat to include in this series that we're doing Misunderstanding Quality. But as I'm getting these prompts from ASQ on a regular basis, I was reminded of a few things that are near and dear within the world of the American Society of Quality. And one is what's known as Quality 4.0. Not, 1.0, Andrew, 4.0. 4.0.   0:24:00.1 Andrew Stotz: So, we're out of the crisis.   0:24:01.1 Bill Bellows: Oh, and so the phrase, Quality 4.0, this is today, right? And actually, the incentive, "Quality 4.0," this is actually five years old. So maybe they're on to Quality 5.0, Andrew. The phrase, "Quality 4.0," derived from the German industrialization program called Industry 4.0, is an evaluation of the role of quality in the increasing digital and automated world. One question surrounding Quality 4.0 is where increasing automation will leave quality professionals in the future. Technology, Andrew, has changed quality work and now offers useful statistical software that allows the Six Sigma quality movement to grow. Tons of data that allow quality professionals to act on quality issues in almost real time and new statistical methods. So, what I find is, "Quality 4.0" is artificial intelligence. It's the Internet of Things. It is technology. So if Deming was writing the, you know, the chapter on that we just mentioned earlier, the list of all the things on that list would be pretty much everything I see in "Quality 4.0." Right.   0:25:23.9 Bill Bellows: So, how far have we come in the professional world of quality? At least I am... I find there's a lot missing relative to what Dr. Deming was talking about 30 some years ago. So, that's what I wanted to put on the table is, you know, we're again not... None of us have said we're against tools and techniques. Whether it's chat GPT, artificial intelligence, those are fantastic. But if they're not guided with a System of Profound Knowledge, then you're going to improve uniformity in isolation.   0:26:09.8 Bill Bellows: And we've talked about that in this series and that is the difference between precision and not accuracy. It is making things uniform. Then you have to ask, again when I... What I challenge for those that are in the Six Sigma world is everything I've seen and I've been reading a lot about Six Sigma for the last 30 years. Everything I see about it when it comes to reducing variability, it is about reducing variability to shrink the distribution such that, what, Andrew? Such that we end up with acceptability 100% all. No red beads, all white beads. And then we get into... I went in preparation for a call today to the ASQ website to learn, just a reminder, refresher on Quality 4.0 and again, nothing wrong with advanced digital technologies, but what if we coupled that with a strong foundation that we're trying to offer people in the Deming ??? who are interested in what Dr. Deming's ideas bring to improve, to guide that technology. So anyway, that's, you know, Quality 4.0. Also, I'm on the ASQ website and their glossary section if anyone wants to go look there. If you're a member, you get free access to this. "Quality, a subjective term for which each person or sector has its own definition."   0:27:42.7 Bill Bellows: Okay. "In technical usage, quality can have two meanings. One, the characteristic of a product or service that bears on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs. Two, a product or service free of deficiencies." Excuse me. "According to Joseph Juran, quality means fitness for use. According to Philip Crosby, it means conformance to requirements." And I don't see in here a reference to Dr. Deming and how he defined quality, Andrew. Huh? Interesting. What I enjoyed about being a member of the... In fact I'm still a member of the American Society for Quality. The reason I joined is I was excited by quality. Everything I was learning about Dr. Taguchi's work and then Dr. Deming's work and then began to wonder if the American Society for Quality was advancing and doc... So if anyone listening has access to the American Society for Quality and people that make decisions there, you might want to include Dr. Deming's definition of quality.   0:29:00.2 Bill Bellows: Where Dr. Deming would say a product or service possesses quality if it helps someone and enjoys a sustainable market. And what I find is unique about that is my interpretation, as Dr. Deming is saying a lecture I deliver, a podcast we present, that we are not the judge of the quality that our listeners, students are. The people downstream are the judge of that. So, it's not me handing off a part that meets requirements saying this is good. Even when Juran says fitness for use, what I would ask is fitness absolute or is fitness relative? And so that's... So anyway, I just thought it'd be fascinating to remind our listeners of the simplicity of Dr. Deming's message from The New Economics. You know, is everyone and anyone in favor of quality? Yes. And again, nothing wrong with tools and techniques, but what a Deming organization, a Blue Pen Company, a "We" organization. What they could do, guided by the Deming philosophy, with computers, where computers make sense, with AI, where AI makes sense, would seriously outpace what other companies are doing. It's interesting, but it's just not enough to compete with companies who will do that.   0:30:32.3 Bill Bellows: So, if nobody is following the Deming philosophy, then you can get by with Quality 4.0, doing AI and doing those things. But if you've got competitors and what Dr. Deming would say, Andrew, is be thankful for a good competitor, one who raises your game, right. And so, if you and I are playing tennis and you know, we're out there to become better tennis players, and as soon as I find out that you're out there so you can go brag to your mom about how you beat me last night, then I say, "Andrew, find somebody else to beat." But if you're interest and my interest is, you know, getting a lot of exercise and improving our game. That's a different story. So, that's what I just wanted to share with our ongoing listeners, is there's a lot to be gained by continuing to study the Deming philosophy. Add it to your repertoire, build a foundation guided by what The Deming Institute is doing and sponsoring podcasts like this, as well as DemingNEXT is, there's just a lot of opportunities for what Dr. Deming is offering. And I'm reminded of that on a regular basis that people are saying, "Boy, why didn't I learn about this a long time ago, what this can bring organizations?" So that's what I wanted to bring to the table today.   0:31:50.1 Andrew Stotz: That's wonderful. Well, Bill, on behalf of everyone at The Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for this discussion and for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. You'll see DemingNEXT there and the like. If you want to keep in touch with Bill, just find him on LinkedIn and reach out to him because he is responsive. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I want to leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming. I just never stop talking about this quote 'cause I love it. "People are entitled to joy in work."  

In the final episode of the series, Jacob Stoller and Andrew Stotz discuss the difference between typical companies using traditional management and more successful Deming-style companies. If productivity and performance are so much better, why do companies stick with traditional management? TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I continue my discussion and conversation with Jacob Stoller, Shingo Prize winning author of The Lean CEO. And ladies and gentlemen, I just received my copy finally. Productivity Reimagined, it just arrived from Amazon. You can get it there. And that's the latest book that he's come out with. And this is exploring applying Lean and Deming Management Principles at the enterprise level. The topic for today is moving forward with productivity. Jacob, take it away.   0:00:41.7 Jacob Stoller: Oh, thank you, Andrew. Great to be here once again. Yeah. Moving forward. That's really Chapter 13. Whether you consider that, hopefully you consider 13 lucky as I think they do in Italy.   0:00:57.4 AS: We do in Thailand.   0:01:00.4 JS: Oh, really? Wonderful. Okay. Perfect. Anyway, so I wrote in the book, I sort of defined where we're trying to go by describing two companies; a typical company, and then the company that we would aspire to for maximum productivity. So I'm gonna read those, just to illustrate. "Company A follows traditional top-down management practices. Leaders determine how the work is to be done, and give orders to their staff accordingly. Individuals, functional groups and departments are treated as independent entities under centralized control. Pay and promotion are determined by individual performance according to a set of predetermined criteria. Employees are ranked and encouraged to compete with each other." So that's company A, your typical company, which probably comprises what percentage would you say? 90%? 95%?   0:02:03.8 AS: 97.9%   0:02:04.4 JS: Okay. Okay. Let's look at where we'd like to go from there. "Company B is managed as an interactive system where people and functional teams depend on each other. Supervisors aren't expected to have all the answers, and they rely on frontline workers to share their workplace knowledge and take an active role in improving their work processes. All employees know they are part of a team culture pursuing common goals and solving problems together to move the company forward." Okay, so that's really, that's where we wanna be. And the reason you would want to go there is because if you take those two companies and they have similar resources, similar markets, perhaps operating in similar region, company B will outproduce company A 10 times out of 10. It's a more productive model, and it's proven to work. So why don't people do it?   0:03:16.3 JS: Well, there's some thinking that gets in the way, some sort of systemic kinds of barriers that are out there. So even people who aspire to making a company better, and I think there are a lot of people out there that think that, but they run into these barriers, and I'm just gonna review them again because we've gone through them in some detail. But the myth of segmented success, that's the really kind of the exact opposite of a company as a system. It's this idea that all the parts are interchangeable. You can take a department, you can give each department separate goals, and they'll all make their goals and it'll all add up. That's the myth, of course. So the myth of segmented success. We have really stemming out of that the myth of the bottom line.   0:04:11.9 JS: And because of that segmented structure, we believe that we can use finance as a proxy for all the quantitative, all the accomplishments of all these different segments. It all adds up. It's arithmetic. We figure, so why not? We just take, everyone makes their numbers, and then they all make their numbers and they all celebrate together. That's the myth, of course. The bottom line doesn't tell you what's really going on in the company. The top-down knowledge myth they run into, and that's this whole idea that managers are supposed to know all the answers, and their job is to tell people what to do. And it's not just people with MBAs. It's people with degrees in psychology and maybe working in HR. It's engineers, it's any person with professional training, figures that they have not only the privilege, but a duty to actually tell people what to do. And if I'm not telling people what to do, I'm probably not doing my job and somebody's going to be looking over my shoulder. So a big fear around that.   0:05:31.6 JS: Myth number four is the myth of sticks and carrots. And this is this idea of Homo Economicus, the idea that people act in their own financial interest and it's perfectly predictable. Performance is down? Well, let's just pay them more or maybe we need some threats here. Maybe we need to threaten them, or maybe we need to get some competition. So somebody is gonna be a little bit worried looking over their shoulder that they might get fired. Fear is a big factor here, obviously. Finally, there's the myth of tech omnipotence. And this stems right from the myth of segmented success. This idea we can take a process and we can swap out technology, we can put in technology and swap out people. We can reduce head count by 5, 10, 15 people and put in a machine in its place. That's been the business case for technology for decades. And we still have a very strong belief in that. So that's kind of what we're stuck with, those myths. And we really have to crush those myths as we go along.   0:06:42.5 AS: You know, Jacob, I was just at a meeting yesterday with a very senior executive at a very large company in Thailand. And I was just talking to him, it's off the record, so we were just chatting, but he was talking about the challenges that they're facing, and I said, so how are your KPIs? And he said, KPIs are just killing us. They're causing us to be siloed. It's setting up competition in the company. People can't work together. And I asked him this question, like, what can you do about it? He says, not much. What am I gonna do? Remove the KPI system? No. We know...   0:07:31.1 JS: Isn't that interesting?   0:07:34.8 AS: That ultimately that's probably one of the best things that they could do and get people to work together. But it just, you know, he said something to me that just made me think about, for the listeners and the viewers out there who are running small and medium-sized businesses who feel disadvantaged so many times when they're fighting against the big giants...   0:07:53.6 JS: Yeah.   0:07:53.6 AS: Take comfort that you can change your business. But many of these big companies, they just can't. And they won't.   0:08:01.2 JS: Yeah.   0:08:03.5 AS: And they never will. So that's what's so great about these types of principles, both Lean, what you're talking about, Deming, is that if you're a business owner, it's a family business, it's your private business or a group of people that you have real control over the business, you can implement these things. And you can build your business to be great.   0:08:23.7 JS: That's interesting, Andrew. I've talked in my book, I've talked with some smaller manufacturers, and at least a couple of them have said they're getting refugees from large corporations. And he'll interview these people and say, well, I can't give you, you know, you won't have 500 people reporting to you or anything. And they say, I don't care. I said, I really, you know, I've had it with this corporate stuff, and they want to be part of a culture that makes a difference. And so that's maybe catching on. I mean, interesting that the gentleman you're talking with also recognized that.   0:09:00.3 AS: Yeah. And he's just as, his hands are tied in some ways. And, so, but that to me is hopeful for the rest of the businesses that can change. And the other thing I was, you know, I always end with my favorite quote from Dr. Deming, which is that people are entitled to joy in work. Yesterday I was speaking to about 75 students in my Ethics in Finance class, and it's the kickoff day. And so it's a real fun, and I talk about a bunch of things, but the one thing I said is that ever since I graduated from university, all I really wanted was a job that I enjoyed, at a place that I enjoyed doing it, with the people I enjoyed doing it with. That's all I wanted. I wanted joy in work and I got it because I walked away from the places and the people where it wasn't happening, and I walked towards the places where I had the opportunity to enjoy it. Of course it helps that I found my love, which is being a financial analyst. It's just, I understand that so well, but this is where I think I want us to think about hope and potential for happiness in work and all of that. And so I know you've got some more steps that you've got to help people. So maybe we move into that.   0:10:27.7 JS: Sure. Sure. Well, and it would be interesting, this gentleman you talked with, I wonder if he's visited any companies that we would admire that are using Deming principles, or maybe...   0:10:39.1 AS: Well, it may give it away, but this company in the past has fully implemented the teachings of Dr. Deming.   0:10:49.2 JS: Oh, really?   0:10:51.5 AS: But they had a changeover in management, and they completely walked away from this and implemented the KPI system.   0:11:00.9 JS: Yeah. Oh my. Isn't that something? Yeah, that happens. That happens for sure. And we've had, you know, in my last book, The Lean CEO, I found some people, number of companies had fallen off the ladder. And gosh, the Shingo Institute had a real problem with that. People were winning Shingo prizes and then they were falling off the ladder, and they changed their emphasis on criteria now, and now they really emphasize culture. You can't just follow the principles, but you really have to get the culture, and they really grill them on that. So, interesting. Interesting.   0:11:38.2 AS: Yeah.   0:11:41.0 JS: But the first step, the reason I asked you if they've visited anybody is really, I think if you're starting from scratch at company A, I think the first thing is to go visit companies.   0:11:48.6 AS: Yep.   0:11:49.5 JS: I mean, you've got to see what's going on in companies that are different to even appreciate what's possible. And it's...   0:12:00.6 AS: 'Cause it's inspiring.   0:12:00.7 JS: It's not only inspiring, but you see things that you wouldn't expect to see. And I think what they said, what these folks have told me over and over again is that what you see is you actually feel it. There's a culture in there, there's a kind of an atmosphere when you walk in the door. And that's what really wows people. I hear that over and over again. So you have to feel that, you can't write that down, or you can't explain that in a talk. So I think that's really the first step. And fortunately, companies that have gone through these transformations are happy to welcome people to come visit, because it helps them reinforce their culture as well. So it's a reinforcing kind of thing. I think after you've done that, gone the rounds a bit, that's when you really need to assess where you are and what you wanna be. And I think there has to be some honest criticism about the kind of company you are. I don't know if you wanna call it soul-searching, but there's not a realization that we don't wanna go on as we were, you're really not gonna do much. So that's, I think, critically important. You're smiling. Do you have a story there?   0:13:20.8 AS: No, but I'm just, you know, it makes sense. It makes sense. I did actually, you know, in Thailand there was a company that I saw in the newspaper many years ago that it came out in the newspaper that they won the Deming Prize from Japan, from the Union of Scientists in Japan. And so I just called the company and I said, congratulations. And they said, great, thank you. And then I said, and I talked to the CEO of the company, and then I said, could I bring my staff from my coffee, you know, management team from the coffee business to come and see you guys? And he said, yeah. And that started a lifelong friendship with a guy named Srini, who was the guy who won that. He passed away about a year or two ago. And I featured him in my book on Transform Your Business with Dr. Deming's 14 Points. But the idea is...   0:14:11.0 JS: Oh yeah...   0:14:12.7 AS: Go out and...   0:14:14.0 JS: I love that book.   0:14:16.2 AS: Explore and see it, see what's out there.   0:14:16.3 JS: Yeah. For sure.   0:14:17.5 AS: Because you also, when you go out and explore, you also find out, hey, we're pretty good at some of these things and there's things that we're doing well, you know?   0:14:23.5 JS: Of course, of course. So once you've assessed your state, I think it's very, very important, even before you start talking to your people, 'cause it's gonna be a transformation, you're gonna demand an awful lot from your people, you've really got to know where you're going, and you have to establish a vision. And companies have different ways of doing that. But the one thing I would emphasize is that it's gotta be a vision with substance. And I think Dr. Deming would say, by what method? [laughter] You say where you're going. Right? So, for example, a hospital. I saw a hospital that did a very good job of that, establishing a vision, and they wanted to be the safest and most compassionate hospital in their region. They said, well, what would that look like?   0:15:13.3 JS: And they looked at, well, okay, safety would obviously be big. There would be fiscal responsibility. Wait time is a big issue in healthcare, be no waiting. I think there may have been one more as well. But anyway, they established these kinds of what I would call aspirational goals. It's where we, really where we want to be, and it's gotta be something that inspires employees, right? You wanna be a compassionate, safe place for patients to come. I mean, that's what people want. So then what they do is they took it a level down, and they said, okay, well, if we're going to have an exemplary safety record, what would that look like? How would we measure it? And they have safe... The health organizations have safety statistics. So, they have an institution, that third party organization that would report on the numbers, so they could set some targets according to that. And then they go down even further. They say, okay, safety. What are the things that we need to do? What are some of our weaknesses? So they say, well, patient falls was one of them. They have things like medication error, hospital acquired illnesses. So all this goes under the idea of no harm to patients, right?   0:16:44.0 AS: Yeah.   0:16:45.3 JS: All goes together. So, they then started to work on the most pressing one. You know, work on targets, do projects together, PDSA kinds of projects. And they chipped away at it and eventually with a number of projects, they were very successful. But I think the key, of course, is that problems in workplaces and hospitals, maybe especially, are very granular in lots and lots of things, so you need all hands on deck. But they were very, very successful at getting a very high rating just through these efforts. So, that's...   [overlapping conversation]   0:17:28.8 AS: Yeah, the vision with substance is a great one because I think lots of visions are flaky, and we've been working on the vision for Coffee Works, for my company, and that is we supply coffee to every leading brand in Thailand. And that's something that we can visualize, the employees can visualize, they can also see who we don't serve. And also when we lose a customer that's a leading brand, we can say we messed up, but when your contract's up with our competitor, we're gonna be back because we supply every leading brand in Thailand.   0:18:08.0 JS: Right, right.   0:18:10.3 AS: So, substance, vision. Yep.   0:18:13.3 JS: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And I guess you share that, been sharing that kind of vision with your people for a long time, right?   0:18:18.3 AS: Yep.   0:18:21.6 JS: But I mean, would you say, how important would you say vision is? I mean...   0:18:23.2 AS: I think it's critical. And I think that part of what happens is that many companies start with a vision, and then they get, it's just so easy to get distracted. And there's so many, you know, business just grows complex, and then all of a sudden you feel like, we can do all of this, we can do this, we can do that, we can do this, we can do that. The best book on this is Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt. And he talks a lot about what are bad strategies, and he talks about these fluffy visions that really don't help anybody. And so getting a vision with substance, I think is critical.   0:18:58.0 JS: Okay. So we got our vision, it's got real teeth. It's something that we can stand in front of our people and say, here's what we're going to do. And they won't say, oh, this is just another flavor of the month. They'll realize that we're serious and we're gonna do this. The next step, number four, is building trust. And that's extremely important. And one of the manufacturer actually told me a wonderful story about this. He was working in a very... Had a plant in a very rough neighborhood in Baltimore. And when he took over that plant as a general manager, there was terrible culture. People were... He said there was racism and there were just people quitting all the time. And just walking out the door, not showing up to work. You know, the workers hated management.   0:19:56.7 JS: So this guy went in onto the shop floors. I'm your new general manager. And he said he spent the first three or four months just talking to them about their lives. You know, he was committed to the Lean methodology, but he didn't talk about methods, how we're gonna do things different. He just found out what's important to these people. And a lot of 'em were financially strapped. They were in poor neighborhoods. So the direction was really how to make this company more profitable so we can pay you more. And that was kind of a guiding vision and remarkably successful how it did. How he won the people over. And I think there's so many people out there asking people to do things. And, you know, you really have to... Takes a lot of trust. I mean, you're gonna say, I'm gonna admit when I've made a mistake, I'm not gonna cover it up and you're not gonna fire me. You know, that's never happened. So...   0:21:02.9 AS: And I can tell you, for the listeners and the viewers out there, here's a good inspiring movie to get you an idea of thinking about how to get out on the shop floor and understand from the inside what's happening in the business. And the movie came out in 1980, and it's called Brubaker by Robert Redford. And it's the story of a new prisoner warden.   0:21:25.2 JS: Oh, I never saw it.   0:21:27.0 AS: Yeah. Prison warden who goes in as a prisoner, and the governor of the state has sent him in as a prisoner. And so he lives a prisoner's life for, I don't know how long it was, a week, a couple weeks, a month, until eventually he, you know, reveals himself and then takes over. And then he knew all the corruption and all the problems and all the issues, and he went about solving 'em. It's an inspiring movie.   0:21:54.2 JS: Yeah. And more recently, there was a program, I've seen a couple of episodes of Undercover CEO, you know, where CEO actually goes into the workplace in disguise and flips burgers or whatever. And then discovers what's really going on in the company.   0:22:09.2 AS: Yeah, that's a great. That's probably even more applicable.   0:22:11.2 JS: Yeah. Right. So building trust is just... It's very personal. And from that point, you start to make changes. But those changes... My favorite examples, I don't know if this is a general rule, but some of the best examples I've seen are working on safety. You work on safety because improving processes to make them safer is actually kind of like a gateway drug to doing continuous improvement, right? You start to understand what processes are, but first of all, people are improving the process in their own interest.   0:22:50.8 AS: Yep.   0:22:52.2 JS: So you get them very good at making these changes, proposing changes, speaking out, pointing out when other people are not following safety guidelines. Understanding that something has to stop when safety is not there. No, you build on the trust you created and you start to change the culture around that. So that's number five. So you notice I've gone five steps and we haven't introduced any methods or anything. You know, it's...   0:23:23.8 AS: What I noticed from those first five is that they're really all things that senior management need to do before they go out with all their exciting new ideas and start training people and start really bringing that out in a much more aggressive way.   0:23:41.5 JS: Exactly. So really step six is train and transform. And that's when we do all the... That's when we draw the diagrams, and that's when we start the PDSA training or the Kaizen events or whichever type of transformation you're doing. That's when we start to train the workforce and we start to undergo the transformation. So that's all the work, but the transforming work. But we've done enormous preparation before we get there. And I think that's what I've seen is the best way to do it. So we train and transform, and then of course we have to remove barriers as they come. So it might be removing some aspects of the accounting system because they might be holding us back. So you run into the barriers and you take on those barriers as you run into them and you build momentum.   0:24:36.3 AS: Yep.   0:24:38.6 JS: So step seven really is you're building this momentum and you raise the bar. You've done something and now you raise your standards and continue to raise them. And that leads you to a continually improving organization where you're always expecting to get better. People have a joy in work because they know that they're part of making something better. And you continue raising the bar 'cause people like a challenge.   0:25:07.9 AS: Yep.   0:25:08.5 JS: As long as it's a safe environment and as long as it's a team kind of self-supporting workplace. So finally we get to share and learn. So we've gone full circle. You know, you've got... You've gone through a transformation, you're proud of your work, and you start to open the door to visitors because that's where you really reinforce the culture. And, I don't know, you have... You say you have visitors at the coffee place?   0:25:45.9 AS: Yeah. I mean, for me, I just love going to companies that do like to share and learn. And I like to do that too. We get students, a lot of times it'll be like executive MBA students coming to Thailand and others that I'll bring out to the factory, so to get them to see how we do things. But I just personally love to... Well, it's great when you go out to a place, and there's a lot of factories in Thailand for sure where you can just see that they have a vision of what they're doing and they clearly communicate it. I had a company that I saw in the financial data many years ago when I was an analyst that really did something very odd, which was their cash conversion cycle was negative. Normally it's a positive thing for a manufacturing company 'cause they have a lot of inventory and accounts receivable and the like.   0:26:34.9 AS: And so I went out and I met with the CEO and then I said, how did you do this? He said, it took us five years, but we brought our inventory down to seven days of inventory. And how did you do it? And he took me out on the factory floor to meet all the different people doing it. And he said, I put people in teams and they work together and they try to figure out how do we reduce the inventory here? I help them see the overhead cost that's coming from the executives so they could calculate a P&L and understand like, how can they make their section, you know, better? And then he had some of the guys come and speak and explain what they were doing, some of the supervisors and managers on the shop floor. And I was like, wow, this was impressive. So love that sharing and learning.   0:27:22.7 JS: Yeah. No, it's great. And I've had wonderful visits where people are so excited about their work that you think, wow. And of course that means they're really, really productive. I mean, they just... They're doing it because they love it and it's... You can't compare with that kind of creativity that you get from that. So I guess that I'd like to talk a little about the competitive advantages here of taking this journey and, you know, that's the whole point. Productivity becomes your competitive advantage. You outproduce other companies with similar resources. And I believe that the way the world is changing right now, that competitive advantage for company B type companies is going to grow as things... And I have four reasons I cite for that.   0:28:21.0 JS: Reason one is flexibility, adaptability, agility, whatever you wanna call it. You know, we're going with manufacturing and services too much more into high mix, low volume type scenarios. So the mass production machinery approach has just become less and less relevant to manufacturing and also with services as well because it's not... It's less a ones size fits all kinda world. That's one very strong reason. The ability to hire talent. You know, we're just starting to see that. You know, people don't wanna work for these corporations that they feel don't have purpose. And couple of manufacturers actually told me, and this is in the US, I don't know how that compares with Thailand, but in the US he said there's a real crisis not just 'cause people maybe don't have jobs, but because people don't have purpose in their work, so people go home depressed, they take drugs and they've done medical studies on this.   0:29:30.3 JS: You know, if you don't have purpose in your work and you're doing something even though you know it's dumb and you're doing it anyway, just, you know, because to please the boss or whatever, that places huge stress on people. And there are actually medical... They've done medical studies on that, people who work in those kinds of jobs, on the negative effects. So anyway, I think getting the best talent, I hear that more and more anyone I talk to, and I think that's gonna be more and more of a factor. There's a whole deglobalization process going on right now. A lot of reshoring here in North America. People, you know, companies really realizing that sort of the fallacy of having these very, very long supply chains. So it's all about now shortening that supply chain, having immediate suppliers that are close.   0:30:23.9 JS: I mean, that's the only way you're gonna get your inventory turns down to 50 or whatever your friend was talking about. Right? And finally on climate change, that's getting tougher and tougher to deal with. And it's not just about governments not acting, but it's going to be scarcity of resources. It's going to be having to run businesses in difficult climate circumstances. It's gonna be government regulation. It's going to be whether people will come and work for companies that aren't making... Doing their bit to combat this. So those four reasons, I think that's a competitive advantage that's going to grow. And I think it's urgent that corporations act, and Dr. Deming warned that there'd be a crisis coming if companies kept running the way they were, and the crisis is here. We've arrived and, you know, the statistics are terrible. Don't have to bore you with those, but, you know, it's a very rough world and we need, obviously governments will have to act, but we need better companies. Now... Sorry, go ahead.   0:31:48.2 AS: I was... Yeah, that's why he entitled this book Out of the Crisis 'cause there was a crisis then, and the fact is there's still, and it's so many things are harder too particularly in the US with reshoring and that type of thing because education has been decimated also in the US so it's very hard to bring back, you know, engineering prowess and things like that, so. Yep.   0:32:14.1 JS: Yeah, for sure. So I... My sort of wrap up comment would be, answer to your question, not really a question, but your title, you talked about boosting Lean with Deming. So, you know, when we chat about this, but you know what, I was thinking about this, what as a person who wrote about Lean initially and then took a much deeper dive into Deming, what does Deming add, from my perspective? And what excites me the most about Dr. Deming is that I think he was less interested in maybe methods and more interested in fundamental truths. I mean, he really, I think put forward what are really fundamental truths about people, about the physical world and about how people in the physical world interact. And these are, like I say, this is not slogans or anything like this, this is science. I mean, these are proven scientific principles and I think those principles underline any method you use. You know, if you're really following that. And I'm not a Deming scholar enough to be able to say that that's what he meant by profound knowledge. But when you use the term profound knowledge, that's what that means to me. It means just a very fundamental knowledge of the way things work.   0:33:49.8 AS: Yeah. Well, it's exciting to think about how we can learn from what you've written about and what you've talked about. So ladies and gentlemen, the book is Productivity Reimagined: Shattering Performance Myths to Achieve Sustainable Growth. And I've really enjoyed our time, Jacob, to go through all the different myths and to hear the way you look at things which is coming from your direction originally, the Lean direction, and then bringing that thinking together with the teachings of Dr. Deming. So I just wanna thank you and give you the last word. If you'd like to wrap up for the listeners and the viewers to say, what's the main message you wanna get, want them to get out of all the... Out of the book and out of all of our discussion? How would you wrap it up?   0:34:45.4 JS: I would wrap it up by saying, let's look for those fundamental truths. You know, let's not look for slogans, let's not look for techniques. Let's look at what's really true about humans, about the physical world, and let's build our future based on that.   0:35:04.2 AS: Well, Jacob, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion right now and the prior discussions about each part of your book and the myths and the like. And for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey, and you can find Jacob's book, Productivity Reimagined, at jacobstoller.com. 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."