In Their Own Words

Join Bill Scherkenbach, a devoted protégé of W. Edwards Deming, as he shares rare stories and insights from his 50-year journey with the legendary thinker. Discover the fascinating letter of endorsement from Deming and reminisce about memorable dinners with the Toyoda family. Bill discusses the critical importance of management in quality and explains Deming's theories on purpose-driven data collection. With anecdotes about fun times at Ford and candid debates, this conversation captures the heart and humor of Deming's legacy.

William Scherkenbach, a longtime student and colleague of W. Edwards Deming, offers a fascinating glimpse into studying under the legendary figure. He shares personal stories of their late-night discussions and Deming's unique teaching style, combining statistics with storytelling. Scherkenbach reflects on implementing Deming's principles at Ford and GM, highlighting challenges and transformative changes. As he reenters the arena to share these teachings, his passion for continual improvement and the impact of Deming's philosophy shines brightly.

What if you could tackle a persistent problem without guesswork? In Part 10 of the Path to Improvement series, John Dues and Andrew Stotz discuss how John's team uses Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycles to calm a chaotic process with precision. Discover how to shift from blame to solutions by leveraging data and Deming thinking. You'll also find out where the team stands on their path to reducing chronic absenteeism in their schools. Listen now! #EducationLeadership #ContinuousImprovement #SystemsThinking #DemingInEducation 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 the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. The topic for today is mapping the process, part two. John, take it away. 0:00:23.5 John Dues: Hey, Andrew. It's good to be back. Yeah, we've now been talking about our efforts to improve chronic absenteeism for several episodes. And we've talked about two Plan-Do-Study-Act or PDSA cycles focused on where we were working with specific students and their families regarding obstacles to getting to school. And then we shifted gears, and we started running this PDSA cycle three that we talked about last time. And just as a refresher for listeners, the objective of PDSA three is to create a process map, basically. And the goal for the process map is to standardize our attendance intervention system. And I think one of the things that comes to mind when you sort of work on process maps or on important processes is this quote from Dr. Deming. He said, If you can't describe what you're doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing, which is pretty convicting when you really think about it. I think a lot of people initially will say, No, no, no, I know exactly what our process is. And then you say, Well, write it down, map it. And then it becomes much more apparent that most people most of the time have a very rough version in their head that they can't translate into an actual written process. 0:01:44.8 Andrew Stotz: And I'm curious why that is, because on the one hand, when I've done mapping a process, you end up with, Okay, but then there's this exception, and then there's this. And oh, yeah, but don't forget that. So there's like all these intricacies. That's one reason. And then there's another reason is why is that someone's tunnel vision on I know the process because I know the three parts of the process that I'm working with. Why do you think it's hard for people to understand the whole process? 0:02:11.9 John Dues: Well, I think that first reason is probably the biggest reason where there's when they actually start mapping it, there's all these things that they initially left out. And I think as soon as an organization gets to a certain number of employees and has a certain amount of complexity, or you have to add a person that's now going to do part of what you previously did because your role changed or something shifted, needs change, or whatever in the environment. And you have to bring them in. You realize pretty quickly that you can't rely on that stuff that lived in your head anymore. So I think it's a combination of all those things for why this becomes so important. And the other reason I mean, the reason you want to do this is so that there's a starting place, a standard place where people are working from so that whatever it is that the focus is that it can be improved. It's hard to do that when there's no set process to start with. 0:03:08.5 John Dues: Let me. I'll share my screen and just kind of as a refresher, take a look at some of that data that we've talked about so far on this chronic absenteeism front. So, you'll remember that we have this long range goal to improve chronic absenteeism. We've kind of talked about where we are now, where we want to be. So where we are now is in that sort of 40 to 50 % range in terms of chronic absenteeism. We want to be down in under 5%. We have eight years of data going back to the 16-17 school year. And the other thing we've talked about on the data front is that really we have this pre-pandemic world and this post-pandemic world when it comes to chronic absenteeism. For anybody that's watching, you can clearly see this on the process behavior chart or control chart that's on the screen where prior to COVID, we're sort of humming along around 25% chronic absenteeism, which is still high. But now, since COVID, we've since the pandemic, we've skyrocketed. So there's this clear, sort of, new reality, new system for schools like ours that... 0:04:23.7 Andrew Stotz: And can you, just for someone that may be just popping in and hearing this, can you just describe what is chronic absenteeism rate? 0:04:31.9 John Dues: Yes, chronic absenteeism is a standard federally defined level of absenteeism where kids are called chronically absent once they've missed 10% or more of the school year. So the percent of kids that are chronically absent is what's being displayed. 0:04:50.5 Andrew Stotz: So if a school has 100 kids, this chart is saying that 50% of them are chronically absent? 0:04:58.9 John Dues: Yes. Yep. 0:05:00.5 Andrew Stotz: Okay. Yep. 0:05:01.1 John Dues: And that's not since the pandemic happened. That's not atypical, especially for schools that serve a high population of students that are economically disadvantaged, basically, unfortunately. So that's the goal, sort of cut it by a significant amount, 40 to 50% down to less than 5%. So that's the goal. And we've looked at the... Last time we looked at sort of the processes that are currently in place. So just as a quick refresher, United Schools, where I work, is a small urban public charter school system. We have four campuses, and there's people from each of the campuses on this attendance improvement team. And what we've been doing lately is sort of mapping out the process that each campus is using. Each campus has their own little process for intervening with kids that are chronically absent. They have different people that are doing different parts of that process. And so we started with just saying, what is it that your process looks like? 0:06:09.3 John Dues: And we looked at a couple of those maps. So this first map is from one of the campuses. It's pretty simple. There's just one or two people involved. The way they represented it initially is just maybe 10 or 15 steps that they're going through to sort of identify who's having attendance issues, sending letters to families, contacting families, that type of thing. But you can see, initially, at least as they mapped it, it's a pretty simple process. And then when we looked at one of our other campuses and they mapped theirs out, it was a slightly more in-depth process. There's sort of more detail. There are more people involved in the process. I'd say there's probably a little more sophistication to sort of when and how they were intervening with parents. And a lot of the intervening is just sort of the compliance requirements. When a kid reaches a certain number of missed hours, we're required to send them a letter to their parents, for example. So a lot of the process currently focuses on sort of the legal requirements when it comes to absenteeism in Ohio's law. But these are two campuses that are about three miles apart, and you can see, even though they're following the same legal sort of requirements from the state, they have very different processes for how that work is being done. 0:07:38.9 Andrew Stotz: Or could you also say that this particular campus, the people involved may have a much deeper understanding of it or a desire to map it out with more detail? Or do you think it's significantly different? 0:07:52.3 John Dues: I think that this second one that looks like it has more steps, I think they have a person that's more of their sort of 1.0 FTEs, like more of their 1.0 FTE is focused on just attendance, whereas it's sort of like a divided responsibility. 0:08:09.7 Andrew Stotz: Wait, what's a 1.0 FTE? 0:08:12.1 John Dues: Like one full-time equivalent person. So a big part of the person's job is this attendance process. So they know this process pretty deeply. So they were able to map it in more detail, basically. So that was interesting. So part of this PDSA cycle three was, so the plan was really had sort of two steps. One, create a standardized process map for the system as a whole that everybody's going to work from. And then, once that's drafted, gather some feedback, both quantitative and qualitative feedback from our network leadership team. So that was the Plan. The Do was just make the map and then gather the input. So that's what's been happening of late with this team. But we can see pretty quickly what they did. And it certainly does help to have an improvement advisor, someone with a deep knowledge of the Deming philosophy and mapping processes, because he's the one at the meetings. He's the one sort of taking everything that the team is telling him, the process maps that the campus teams have done. And then he's putting it all together based at their input. And their input is certainly super important, but he's also very talented at building processes that are coherent and can be understood by many across our system. 0:09:40.3 John Dues: And so what he ended up doing using their input is he's now got a process map that includes not just the nuts and bolts like, okay, the kid has an attendance problem, and we have to send letters and do things like that. He's going back and created a process map that includes four different stages. So this first stage that if you're viewing this part of the process map is just for onboarding, which was completely missing from all of the campus maps. It wasn't on the... So the idea here is the very first thing, the beginning of this process is a new student enrolls. And as soon as they enroll, a family enrolls, there's going to be a number of things that happen, mostly on the educational side, like what is good attendance? So right from the get-go, one of the things they're going to do is they have this welcome folder that a family gets when they come for their tour or their orientation. And right in that welcome folder is going to be our attendance framework that defines what good attendance is and when, where it really starts to become an issue and impacts a kid's education. So this whole first process map, this whole first stage is about onboarding and educating the family and the student about what good attendance is, which was, again, completely missing from the process before. 0:11:10.2 John Dues: The second stage is attendance monitoring. So, the kid's been onboarded, school has started, and now there's a process to monitor every student's attendance, whether they have a problem or not. And this monitoring system is going to be standardized so that different notifications are being sent home to families, different sort of letters, letting them know when things are becoming a problem. So again, this whole process is about monitoring attendance after providing some of that education. And then, if through that monitoring, it becomes apparent that the student needs additional intervention, the next stage is sort of that attendance intervention plan. So this is where the full map before for each campus just focused on this part. And this is obviously, if you look at this compared to the campus maps, this is much more in detail about what's happening. I'd say, the other thing that's happening here is there's problem-solving with the family. So instead of just saying, warning, your kid has gotten to this number of missed hours, and you send that home in a letter, once that happens, you can see that there's actually Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles being run with the family and the student that are off track from attendance perspective and some individual problem solving is happening. 0:12:52.3 John Dues: See, we run three PDSA cycles to try to get them back on track. So that's a brand new component to this attendance system. And then from there, for some kids, if we get them back on track, then we don't have to take any further action. But for other students, there are some, again, some legal requirements. And so the last stage of that process is if we do have to file official truancy charges, sort of like what, or let the state know that the student is now truant, there's some steps that we take to make that filing. But that's far after many, many steps have been taken to educate, to run PDSA cycles with individual kids that are off track, to try to get the family and sort of the knowledge they need to understand, like how to keep their student on track when they're in school. So, there's a good chance that this will change pretty quickly, this process map, it's a good one, I think, having gone through it, it's a solid process, but it'll, as soon as it like gets battle tested, there's going to be updates. Now, that's not say you're going to change things willy nilly, but what you are going to do is you're going to learn what's working, what's not, you sort of have this hypothesis, but at least now, since everybody's working from the standard process, we can make improvements that then can go out to the entire system. 0:14:32.9 Andrew Stotz: Great. I'm curious, what is the definition of truancy these days? When I was in school, there was trouble in River City and it was trouble with a capital T and that rhyme with P and that stands for pool. So you had the trouble of all the kids hanging out at the pool place, but I'm just curious what's going on. What is the definition of truancy these days? 0:15:01.3 John Dues: Yeah, it's when they, I mean, students have to have missed a certain number of hours of instruction. And now instead of attendance being measured in days, there's basically a threshold that you hit in terms of numbers of hours missed that then you legally have to file truancy. 0:15:24.4 Andrew Stotz: But what does truancy mean? 0:15:27.3 John Dues: Truancy just means that you've missed a lot of school, basically. 0:15:31.1 Andrew Stotz: Okay. 0:15:31.4 John Dues: Yeah. Yeah. And in terms of reasons, when we did those first PDSAs, not all those kids were necessarily truant, but they all had serious absenteeism issues. I think what we talked about was that we found that there were many different issues that were sort of at the root of that, which is part of the challenge here is we have high numbers of chronic absenteeism and then lots of different reasons for that. And so how do you problem solve with all those different folks to help get them back on track? That's part of the challenge. For sure, part of the challenge. But so where the team is at now, so they've completed this third PDSA cycle. So the Do was to make the process map and then get the input from the leadership team. And now they're doing the Study and the Act. So the Study, one of the things I talked about was that the initial feedback from folks that aren't a part of the team was more education needed to happen during that onboarding process. 0:16:39.9 John Dues: So that was sort of like a blind spot before. Not that people didn't talk about it, but now it's systematized. Here's the piece of paper, the attendance framework you're going to give them. There's an orientation session on attendance. There's a session with students during their orientation about what's good attendance and how many days does that equate to in terms of missing school throughout the year, that types of things. Another big thing in the study was more personal touches throughout the process and not just sort of those notifications that I talked about, like the attendance warning letters. The group sort of talked about, while some of these letters are required, whether they're that effective or not is definitely in question. 0:17:25.1 John Dues: Another thing is we have a role at each campus that's called Dean of Family and Community Engagement. And so something like attendance is the responsibility of everybody in the school. But if there's a point person at each campus, it's that Dean of Family and Community Engagement. And so there's some worry about, like when I go back to this process, it's the Dean of Family and Community Engagement or DFCE, they're sort of the point person running these PDSAs and the PDSAs can be time intensive. So one of the concerns is, will they be able to sort of handle the workload that sort of comes with this new process? And I think that's definitely an open question, but at least it's on the radar. It's not like no one is saying, here's the process, go figure out how to make this work. That would be a bad way to do it. There's a recognition that we think we need to do some of this problem solving with individual cases, but there's also this recognition that there's going to be a time constraint for the DFCEs. And then another big X factor that was a part of this study write-up was transportation. Because we've talked about how bad transportation, yellow school buses have been in Columbus this year. We've had a lot of problems. And so what's that look like next year, and how does this factor in? When we did those interviews with students and families, it wasn't the primary reason for all families, but I think in about 50% of the families, transportation had some role in the attendance issues. So these are things that are on folks' minds as they're working through this. 0:19:06.5 Andrew Stotz: That's a lot of progress on this. 0:19:09.3 John Dues: Yeah, a lot of progress, I think. And you get questions like, is it worth all the time to do this? And it's like, is this improving anything? And if you're looking at the outcome, probably not yet. But now that there's this standardized process, I think we can actually make some inroads on this chronic absenteeism process. It would be very hard to do in the absence of this standardization that we're going through and this input from the group to put more sort of resources towards this to get some expertise in terms of putting together a process instead of leaving it up to individual people that maybe don't have this skill set. 0:19:53.9 Andrew Stotz: You also recently posted on your LinkedIn about the idea of a system and results. If you don't even understand the system, how are you going to get the results that you want from the system? 0:20:05.8 John Dues: Exactly. If you don't understand what's causing the problem, if you don't have a whole systems view, you could put a process in place that actually makes things worse, may make things better in one area, but make them worse in another area. So yeah, this is complicated stuff when you're trying to make change in a complex system like a school system. 0:20:25.7 Andrew Stotz: Interesting. 0:20:26.2 John Dues: Yeah, the last step is just the Act. So they're deciding what to do. Are they going to adopt this? Are they going to adapt it or abandon the idea? So I think we're not going to abandon it because obviously we're moving forward with this new process map. And it's, I would call this adapt though. So we're going to adapt this process map into the system, but very high likelihood that there are going to be many adjustments to it as it gets put into action. As I was just saying, it's not adopt because if it was adopt, this thing, this process map would be sort of run through a number of cycles where it had been tested, the kinks had been worked out, and it's sort of going to be, this is the way. So what we're doing now is adapt. So we're going to make some improvements based on this initial feedback we got from the leadership team. Now we'll make some additional adjustments, especially next school year because the school year is over during the initial implementation. 0:21:29.8 John Dues: And the other sort of part of the Act was if you read the steps in this process map from start to finish. There are a lot of artifacts that go along with this that don't exist. So for example, this attendance slide deck for new student orientation. That's a part of the process. We probably don't want to leave that up to each individual group to create on their own because what is the content of that? And so that has to be created. So there are a number of things like that, that the improvement advisor for the project is going to take on either creating himself or he's going to strongly support the creation. So those are also standardized across the network. So you see, it's a lot of work. 0:22:20.4 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. 0:22:22.2 John Dues: So that would be where we pick up with, once students come back in August, and that's kind of leaving things off at the end of this school year. 0:22:31.6 Andrew Stotz: That's great. I was mentioning about this little jingle that I was talking about, and it comes from a 1957 movie called The Music Man. And he says, his line is, there's trouble in River City, and it starts with T, and that rhymes with P, and that stands for pool. And it's this guy, he's a con man, a hustler, who's gone to the citizens of a town in River City, Iowa, telling them that the corrupting influence is the pool table in the town that's going to keep the kids from going to school. And he wants to start like a marching band. But for those old-timers that seen that movie, they'll love that reference. And if you haven't seen it, go see The Music Man on... I don't know. It's hard to find things on Netflix these days like that, but maybe it's on YouTube. 0:23:27.9 John Dues: Very classic, just like that. 0:23:30.2 Andrew Stotz: But I remember listening to that when I was young, because my parents always had musicals. My sisters actually played musicals on the record player. So you always was hearing the songs of musicals. 0:23:43.8 John Dues: Well, it seems like the truancy thing is, that's not a new problem necessarily. 0:23:48.1 Andrew Stotz: Oh, yeah, that's for sure. That's for sure. Well, why don't we wrap it up there? And 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. And 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."

How can we improve attendance when every school has a different process? In this episode, John Dues continues his exploration of Deming's philosophy in action, focusing on chronic absenteeism. As part of their third PDSA cycle, John's team shifts from individual interventions to process standardization—mapping how each of their four campuses handles attendance interventions. The surprising discovery? Each school follows a different process, revealing hidden variation and inefficiencies. By visualizing these systems, the team is not only grasping the current condition but also setting the stage for a reliable, scalable, and effective process. This methodical approach highlights how understanding systems and reducing variation are key to meaningful improvement. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.1 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. The topic for today is Mapping the Process. John, take it away. 0:00:26.7 John Dues: Hey Andrew. It's good to be back. Yeah. For the folks that have been following along for the past several episodes we've been working towards defining this problem more narrowly in terms of this chronic absenteeism issue we've been talking about. And for the last few episodes we've been talking about how the team didn't have enough information to write that precise problem statement. And we took a look at gathering additional information by running a couple PDSA cycles in those first two cycles that we've discussed so far. We know we had zeroed in on a handful of students and ran PDSAs with them and their families about their obstacles getting to school. And then we left off talking about how we were going to shift gears in PDSA cycle three. And instead we were going to focus on standardizing our process. So creating a process map for how we intervene with kids with our attendance teams across the network. So that's what the team is currently working on. But just as a sort of quick reminder to folks, and especially if you're watching, we have this model that we've been working through, this four step improvement model where you set the challenge or direction, grasp the current condition, establish your next target condition, and experiment to overcome obstacles. 0:01:48.1 John Dues: And then like we've talked about several times, we're doing this with the team and that includes people working in the system, people with the authority to change or work on the system, and then at least one person with significant knowledge of the System of Profound Knowledge, like an SOPK coach. And we've been using this model that's on the screen to sort of symbolize or I guess visualize what those four steps look like. You're sort of marching up this mountain towards this challenge or direction. And we've also talked about this long range goal that we've had and we've taken a look at some data where we have our chronic absenteeism rate mapped out over the last eight years or so. We have this long range goal. So this is the direction of the challenge where we're trying to take our chronic absenteeism from above 50% down to 5%. We have the data going back to the 2016/17 school year. Then we also talked about how there's this, not surprisingly, there's this sort of pre-pandemic level of chronic absenteeism, which was again too high. It's not where we wanted it, but we have this major shift up where we've seen this significant jump in chronic absenteeism since the pandemic hit. 0:03:15.0 John Dues: So in those four years, 2020/21, 21/22, 22/23 and 23/24 we were up in the 51, 52, even up into the close to the 60% range in chronic absenteeism at the height of the pandemic. So for PDSA cycle three, really doing two things. So, and we're going to talk about this in the episode today. If you remember back way at the start of this series, we looked at something I called a system flowchart. So we'll kind of revisit that and then we're going to take a look at two process maps that were created by two of our school teams to sort of map their current process. And then we'll walk through, sort of we'll take that, we'll walk through what the plan is for this PDSA cycle three. So let's start by looking back at this system flowchart. I'll sort of reorient you to this. So we have up on the, and this is the current state. So up on the top we have the target system which is attendance. And then we have this aim that is sort of a three part aim. 0:04:42.7 John Dues: We want to define strong attendance for students and staff, make sure everybody's on the same page. We want to ensure that students, families and staff have a shared understanding of what it means to have strong attendance. And then we are working on improving and creating systems that identify and remove barriers to strong attendance for students and staff. And then over on the left hand side we have sort of inputs. So these are things that contribute or their conditions that impact our system. And then in the middle we have our core activities. So the things that are happening that impact attendance and then there's outputs, both negative and positive outputs that come out of this system. And then we get feedback from our customers, we do research on this feedback and then we make design if it's a new system or redesign if it's a current system. And some of these things, some of those contributing conditions are, Ohio has a set of transportation laws. You know, there's our school model and our the way we operate our school hours, our expectations regarding student attendance, our various intervention systems, neighborhood dynamics, how far our families live from school. 0:06:03.4 John Dues: These are all things that contribute to our sort of inputs into our system. And then we have these core activities. And remember, we could just zero in on attendance systems. But there are many other parts of our system that impact whether or not kids come to school. So for one, many of our families are always going to be new to our system. So for example, in our middle schools, where they start with sixth grade some number of those kids are going to be from our elementary schools. Some number of those kids are going to come from other neighborhood schools, but they're all going to be new to that middle school. So whether they're coming from our elementary school or not, you have to think about how is the student and family being onboarded to our system. Another thing we're looking at is school culture and trust. You know, how much trust is in there, in the school. Do they have a strong culture between teachers and families or teachers and students, or the principal and teachers? Then there's academic systems how engaging are classes, those types of things. 0:07:05.7 John Dues: Then we have the attendance intervention systems, which is obviously a core focus. We have health and wellness and changes around mindset since we went through the pandemic. And then finally the third sort of, or sorry, the third, not the third, but the sixth core activity that we talked about was transportation. So we've talked about lots of problems with our busing system this year. So that's another thing that has a big impact on attendance. And so what this group, again is working on the core activity is the attendance intervention systems. What's the process for that? But I had mentioned in an earlier episode that we have another group that's working on transportation and busing and how we can improve that. So the whole point of the system flowchart is there's many, many things that go into something like an attendance rate. And many of these things are very challenging. Some are largely out of our control, but much of it is largely in our control. And we're trying to pull the levers that we think are most important when it comes to student attendance. 0:08:09.2 Andrew Stotz: And just one thing on that, one of the things I just find so frustrating and it's part of this class I'm teaching tonight is how do we scale a business. And one of the ways that's critical to scaling is simplifying. And sometimes, like, when I look at all of this complexity, on the one hand, you're like, okay, well, that's our job, right? Our job is to manage complexity. And that's the reason why we don't have a thousand competitors coming in, because it's complex and it's difficult. And on the other hand, it's like the simplifier in me is like, how do we simplify this? You know, like, I'm just curious about how you see complexity versus simplification. And in particular, it may just be in this stage, you're just putting everything up there, and it's just overwhelming. Like, oh, my God, there's so much involved in just fixing one thing, you know? What are your thoughts on that? 0:09:11.5 John Dues: Yeah, that's, I mean, that's a really good question. It's, I mean, I think it is a complex system because there's so many moving parts. And I think part of the nature of a complex system versus something like a complicated system is that when you try to impact some part of the system that has these ripple effects into other parts of the system, many of which are unattended or unintended consequences. So, yeah, I mean, I think one thing we have working in our favor is very stable senior leadership. So we're pretty good at understanding how we all work. We have a pretty good historical knowledge of how our school system has worked over time. And we have a pretty good holistic view of all of this complexity. Not that we're all able to improve it all at once, but I think we have a pretty good grasp of what's going on. And even a team like this there we could move faster perhaps, but I think we're trying to be pretty deliberate about the changes that we're making. 0:10:24.7 John Dues: And we're also deliberate about the levers that we're trying to pull for improvement. And these things change over time. So even something like transportation, I mean, the reason that we're working on that now and that we've chosen to work on that now is because the transportation that we're getting from the district is so untenable. Whereas 15 years ago, when I was a principal in our system, while the busing wasn't perfect, it was pretty consistent. You know, most days it dropped off at about the same time. It picked the kids up at about the same time every day. And while it was nowhere near where you would want it to be overall, it wasn't my biggest pain point as a principal. Now kids are literally missing hours or buses aren't showing up at all. And so we have to figure out a way to make this work. And to your point this was a system when charter schools were set up in Ohio, is just basically like the district, the nearby district, which is usually a big urban district, is going to do the busing for charter schools. 0:11:35.5 John Dues: And there really wasn't any more thought to it than that and so from the district's perspective, they they have to manage a lot of complexity. They have their own schools, they're busing for charters, which there's about 15,000 kids in charter schools in Columbus. And then they're also busing for private schools. And the district itself still has a very large geographic footprint, even though the number of students that attend there are about half what it was 50 years ago. So they have very spread out buildings, some of which are far below capacity, but they still have students attending them. So they haven't shrunk that geographic footprint. So that's a challenge as well. And at a time when it's become very difficult to find bus drivers. So I don't take lightly, like the challenges that the district is facing in this, but we got to get kids to school as a... Just as a basic starting point to be being able to do school well. 0:12:31.8 Andrew Stotz: Okay, keep going. 0:12:33.8 John Dues: I mean, it's also a really good segue. We'll take a look at a couple of the process maps. So we have our four campuses. We have something different going on. So even though our four campuses are geographically pretty proximate to each other, they have four different processes going on with their attendance intervention system. So take a look at this first process map, which is pretty simple from start to finish. What is that? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. It's really nine steps and it really... 0:13:08.6 Andrew Stotz: And for the listeners out there that can't see it, he's got a process map, State Street. And what it shows is some circles and some squares and some tilted squares. I don't know what those are called. 0:13:23.5 John Dues: Yeah, I mean, it's just the circles are the start and end points. 0:13:26.9 Andrew Stotz: Okay. 0:13:27.8 John Dues: The squares are the steps in the process. And then the diamonds are, when there's a... Some decision has to be made in the process. 0:13:37.0 Andrew Stotz: Okay, great. 0:13:38.0 John Dues: So we're not going to go through all of these steps. But if you are watching this is a pretty simple process at one of our campuses, while there are multiple people sort of involved, it's also true that one person is driving a lot of this work. But the point is, especially for people that are watching, when you sort of walk through these 10 steps, you're going to see that this map is going to look very different and less complicated than the map at one of our other campuses. But the point is, especially if you can see things visually that you can tell just by looking at the two maps, there are two very different processes going on. And these two schools, this first one is actually an elementary school that feeds into the middle school. That is the map that we'll look at second, so this is the first process map. And then when we look at the second map, we can see very quickly, just visually speaking, there are far more steps, it's far more complicated. There's far more decision points. There's a lot more detail here, and there's a lot of interfacing between multiple people that all play a role in this particular process. 0:14:55.4 John Dues: And it's not that one is right and one is wrong. It's just that when you have these two campuses doing it differently, there very likely is inefficiencies. 0:15:06.8 Andrew Stotz: And are they mapping the same thing? And they... 0:15:10.6 John Dues: Yes, it's the same process. It's how they intervene as the state requires for kids that have some type of attendance issue. And there's different thresholds that mean different parts of the process kick in as a result. But they're operating within the same state process that you have to follow. But even so, you can see that they have a very different sort of illustration of what that process looks like. And if I had the other two campuses, we'd have four separate versions. And remember all these steps and you know, all these decision points. There's documents that exist. There's meetings that happen. There's agendas for those meetings. There's agendas for meeting with parents. There's letters that have to be mailed. And so you can imagine if everybody is creating separate forms, separate meeting agendas, keeping this information in different ways. There's probably a way to design this that's far more effective and efficient by pulling from the four different processes to create one process. And oh, by the way, if you do that, it makes training easier for anybody new that's going to take on some of the clerical roles or some of the interfacing with parents. 0:16:26.9 John Dues: And then if you have one process that you're working from, then you can also share best practices as they emerge as you're working. But if you have four variants, it's much harder to share that information. 0:16:43.4 Andrew Stotz: And you know, it's questionable whether this is a core function. It is an important process. Is it the core? 0:16:54.8 John Dues: Yeah, I mean, I would say it's a, I guess depending on how you define core. I mean, it's a required process. It's a process that the state requires and a lot of the sub steps are required components. Now, interestingly, this, the setup for this attendance intervention system came out of some legislation called Health...House Bill 410. And it's been in place for maybe five years or so, four or five years. And they're changing it right now. So there's new language. 0:17:30.2 Andrew Stotz: Just when we got it set. 0:17:32.2 John Dues: Just when we got it set. But we at least know the likely changes that are coming. So Ohio operates on a two year budget cycle. So in this new budget that will likely pass on. Well, it has to pass by June 30th. Right now there's language in there that changes this process for schools and actually gives schools way more leeway. So we'll sort of be ahead of the game because we're going to have our own process mapped and you know, we can remove some of those things that are a little more cumbersome on the school teams. And to your point, those things that were compliance related but didn't have really impact on improving attendance, we could just remove those now. We'll have some more freedom there. 0:18:13.8 Andrew Stotz: I mentioned about the core thing because there's a great book I read called Clockwork by Michael Michalowicz and he talks about identifying what is the core function in your business and then really focusing in on that. And it's interesting because one of the benefits of that is that if you don't do that, you can get caught up in every process like, and then all of a sudden it's just everything is seen as equal. 0:18:43.6 John Dues: Right. Yeah. 0:18:44.6 Andrew Stotz: Anyways, keep going. 0:18:45.9 John Dues: Yeah, it's one of those weird things and I'll stop sharing. Yeah, that was the last visual. But that's one of those things where like I said for the last five years or so these things have been required. And I think you'd be hard pressed to find a school system that would say these, the way things are outlined as requirements for schools to do on this front are not effective but people do them because they're required. And you know, I think with this updated language, we'll have some more flexibility to do this how we want to do it. 0:19:20.4 Andrew Stotz: And how does this, just to clarify how it fits into that mountain diagram, this is trying to assess or deal with the obstacle or is this the current state? I noticed that it said current state for the process map. But is the purpose of what you're... The original one you show. But is the purpose of what you're doing trying to overcome the, identify and overcome the obstacle? 0:19:46.8 John Dues: Well, I would say this is a part of grasping that current condition. You know, we did that early on in terms of that system flowchart, in terms of what the whole system looks like. And now what we're doing is learning about the processes at each individual school. Well, I'd say when you map out a process like this, and I think people would probably, my guess is, is that senior leaders would often say, well, no, we have a process and you know, everybody follows the same thing. And then if you actually mapped it like that, step by step, what you would see is tons of variation, tons of variation. 0:20:23.9 Andrew Stotz: So one of the benefits of that is it's not only, it's about facing the reality or understanding the true current state. Like everybody can say, no, no, no, we all know what the current situation is. No, we don't. 0:20:41.2 John Dues: No, you don't. And every time I sit with a team and make these process maps, we'll say, okay, what's the next step? And you know, maybe a couple people will pipe up and then someone inevitably goes, well, no, wait a second, that's not what we do. What we do next is X, Y or Z. I mean, it's... And that happens over and over and over again with this with this process just seems to be a part of it. It's not a bug. It's actually a feature of this mapping exercise. 0:21:08.5 Andrew Stotz: And many people try to solve these problems by just jumping in rather than taking the time to really, truly understand the current state. You know, what's the risk of the action taker? 0:21:22.7 John Dues: Well, yeah, I mean, I think what happens a lot of times is like when people don't really understand a process like this is they start blaming people for things that aren't going right. That's what typically happens. 0:21:35.8 Andrew Stotz: I want people to take responsibility around here. 0:21:38.3 John Dues: We have to hold people accountable, but you can't hold them accountable to a process that's unknown. Right. It's not well specified, but that's what typically happens. So, so yeah, so the objective for this PDSA cycle, so we're on this third cycle. So those first two were focused on talking to individual kids, interviewing with individual kids. And we said well let's actually look at our process for how we're intervening from a school perspective as a team at each of the schools and let's standardize that process. 0:22:13.1 John Dues: So that's what we're doing. We're sort of mapping it from start to finish, gathering feedback from key stakeholders as we sort of map a standardized process that works across all four schools. And really one of the things that we're doing right now is we're saying can we develop a process? And we have these four dimensions that we're looking for to sort of meet. One is functional, one is, is it reliable? Third, to your point about the business talk you're giving tonight is is it scalable? You know, does it work across the entire school and across the entire school system? And then is it effective? And we're basically, the attendance improvement team basically is going to put together the process and then they're going to put it in front of our senior leaders and we're going to rate sort of the process across those four dimensions and they've sort of predicted what they think is going to, how it's going to hold up when it's sort of tested by those senior leaders. 0:23:12.8 John Dues: So that's kind of what we're doing right now. So step one is mapping the four campuses and then we're going to map one standardized process, at least a rough draft. And again, so once that initial network wide or system wide map is created, we're going to put it in front of that senior leadership group. We're going to give them a brief survey, sort of a Likert scale across those four dimensions and see, see what they think basically. So that's our next step right now. 0:23:40.6 Andrew Stotz: Exciting, exciting. I want to tell a little story to wrap up my contribution here and that is after many years of living in Asia, I started to realize that everything's connected in Asia, people are connected. If you want to be mean to somebody, it's going to come back around to you. And if you want to push on somebody, it's going to come back around because everybody knows everybody. And I like to picture it like a circle. Let's just say a bunch of people in a circle facing the same direction. And then let's say they all put their right arm on the right shoulder of the man or woman in front of them. So now we have a circle that's connected in such a way. And if you think you're going to get something done by squeezing on the shoulder of the person in front of you, the problem you're going to face is that that's going to transmit all the way around the circle until all of a sudden you're going to be squeezed. And that is my visualization of the way influence works in Asia. Yeah, but I feel like it's the same type of thing when you just say, I want to hold people accountable and we need responsibility around here. 0:24:57.8 Andrew Stotz: What ends up happening is that the only choice that someone has is just to squeeze on the person in front of them. And when they do that, it just transmits a squeeze all the way around. It builds fear, it builds distrust and all of that. And so that. That was a visualization I was having when you were talking. 0:25:16.4 John Dues: Yeah, I mean, I think... And it can be convicting a little bit there. There's a Dr. Deming quote that I'll share to sort of wrap this. Before I do that, I think again, I go back to we... There are these unknown things about how to improve attendance. And so this PDSA, this plan, do study, act cycle, we're using one, again, was intervening with kids and trying to work with a handful of kids that had attendance issues and just see what works and what doesn't. We've shifted gears in this third cycle to something very different. But this is all part of one comprehensive effort by this team to put this new system in place. And all of these pieces of information are important, but this and this mapping, the process thing I think is a great... And I think maybe a lot of people wouldn't think about that as a PDSA to plan a new process, but you can absolutely use it in that way. But the Dr. Deming quote that I think of when I do process mapping is "if you can't describe what you're doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing." 0:26:21.7 John Dues: And I think that's true. Again, it's not to convict people, but I think often when we say, well, that's this thing is going wrong, we need to hold people accountable. And then you ask that person that's making that claim, well, what is the process for this thing? And they often can't tell you. Or they do, it's so vague that nobody could. 0:26:45.3 Andrew Stotz: Or they say, that's not my responsibility. My responsibility is to hold you accountable for getting the result. 0:26:51.4 John Dues: Right. Yeah. And, and, and many people, many organizations don't write these things down. You know, they don't write them down and share them with folks. So that's just some of these simple things are as part of the power making things exciting. 0:27:05.1 Andrew Stotz: Exciting. Well, yeah, how about we wrap it up there and so what are we going to get next time? 0:27:10.7 John Dues: Yeah, I think so. What we went through quickly here at the end was the plan for this PDSA cycle. So by the time we get back together, will have the process map for the system and we'll have had the feedback back and we'll be able to compare that to what the group predicted. 0:27:28.8 Andrew Stotz: So ladies and gentlemen, we're watching it in real time unfold the applications of Dr. Deming's principles. And isn't that what we want? You know, obviously we love theory and we love ideas, but we really need to be all thinking about how we apply these things. And so from my perspective, I'm really enjoying this series and I'm learning a lot. And as I mentioned before, I've been improving some of my thinking and some of my teaching in particular, based upon the discussions that we've had. So 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. And also 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 This is your host, Andrew Stotz. And I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming. I know you've heard it before, but I'm going to say it again. Until we have joy. "People are entitled to joy in work."

David Williams and Cliff Norman, co-authors of "Quality as an Organizational Strategy," discuss the transformative journey leaders must embark on to foster learning organizations inspired by Deming's principles. They dive into the challenges of moving from traditional management methods to quality strategies, emphasizing the importance of leadership commitment and external support. Personal stories illustrate the profound impact of Deming's teachings, highlighting how tangible improvement projects can drive real change. The conversation also touches on the need for self-assessment and the importance of developing internal improvement capabilities.

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.