In Their Own Words

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.

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Can you use Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) during the information-gathering phase of an improvement project? Yes! Join John Dues and host Andrew Stotz as they discuss how John's team used PDSA to learn more about chronic absenteeism, their surprising findings, and what they'll do next. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.8 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. The topic for today is powerful learning with the PDSA cycle. John, take it away. 0:00:25.5 John Dues: Yeah, Andrew. It's good to be back. For the past two episodes or so, we've been working towards defining the problem of our chronic absenteeism issue, of course, we have a problem with chronic absenteeism, but we're trying to narrow that down and get a more specific problem statement. Last time we talked about how our improvement team, basically, had come to the conclusion after a few weeks of study that we didn't have enough information to write that specific, precise problem statement. So what we decided to do, and we started looking at this last time, was we started to gather additional information through a Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle. So that's what we'll focus on today, is this first PDSA cycle, and I think it's good to know that you can use PDSAs to run an experiment to test a new idea, but you can also run a PDSA to gather more information. Those are both very worthwhile uses of the PDSA cycle. So I go to share my screen just so I have that model up so that people who can see it, for those that are viewing. Can you see that now? 0:01:33.8 Andrew Stotz: Coming up. Okay, we can see it. 0:01:36.6 John Dues: All right, great. So you remember, we've been working through this four-step process for those who are hopping in for the first time or as a review for those that have been following along. So we have these four steps: set the challenge or direction, grasp the current condition, establish your next target condition, and then an experiment to overcome obstacles. And remember, we've been working through this team, that's a combination of people working in the system, people who have the authority to actually change the system, and then the System of Profound Knowledge coach. So I think that's a pretty powerful combination of people, and that's our team here working on this chronic absenteeism problem. You also remember that we have this long-range goal that this challenge that is to improve our chronic absenteeism from right around 50% to down closer to 5%, and I don't know if you remember this, but a number of episodes ago, I showed you the data we had over time, and we just had three years of data. Since that time I showed you that first run chart, I've actually gone back and added chronic absenteeism rates for our schools going all the way back to the 2016 - '17 year, and I think it's worth it to just take another quick look at those rates over time in a process behavior chart. 0:03:00.2 Andrew Stotz: Exciting. 0:03:01.5 John Dues: So, yeah. This is our chart. So we add more days so why not display it in this way. So what this chart is, is again a process behavior chart, we have school years going back to the 2016-'17 school year, and then through last school year. And we have the blue dots displaying the chronic absenteeism rate for each of those school years across our school system, and then the green is... The green line is that central line, it's the average of all years, the red lines are those natural process limits that sort of tell us where we can expect our data to fall given that this is a predictable system. So you can see right off the bat, something that's pretty obvious is that the first four years of data are below that central line, and then the last four years of data are above that central line. And of course, it's not too hard to sort of recognize that the pandemic happened towards the end of the 2019-'20 school year, and then sort of... We were all remote heading into that 2021 school year, and then for a number of years after we were in remote or hybrid, and so you can see very clearly that while there was chronic absenteeism in our system prior to the pandemic, after the pandemic, it exploded and it has not subsided. 0:04:28.7 John Dues: So in a typical year prior to the pandemic, we were somewhere around that 25, about a quarter of the kids give or take, depending on the year, of the kids were chronically absent, and then after the pandemic, we can see it sort of... Or at the begining of the pandemic, explodes up and then has settled around this, right about 50% average. 0:04:51.1 Andrew Stotz: And the fact that it's remained at this much higher level of, let's say 50-55% tells you that there's like... It has had somewhat of a permanent impact, whereas some people may think that the COVID situation caused a spike in chronic absenteeism up to 70% or whatever that number was, and then it came back to normal. But it's far away from normal. 0:05:26.4 John Dues: Yeah, and I haven't done a deep analysis. But in addition to the chronic absenteeism, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is like the gold standard, the report card for the nation, a nationally known test given every couple of years, that data shows that the 4th and 8th graders that take that test across the country in ELA and math, the scores are down coming out of the pandemic as well and have not rebounded. So I think that data is important. I'm not necessarily saying one way or the other, what we should have done, but what I am saying is like when we make decisions like shutting down schools, it's not just a decision that has an impact in the moment, there are ramifications on an ongoing basis. And we should sort of take that calculus into consideration when we're deciding what to do in a situation like that. 0:06:20.0 Andrew Stotz: And this also shows that you're taking on a pretty serious challenge because... 0:06:23.8 John Dues: Very serious. Yeah. 0:06:25.0 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, it's serious for the students, but it's also serious in the sense that it's been lingering at this very high level of chronic absenteeism, so, okay. 0:06:37.0 John Dues: Yeah. 0:06:37.5 Andrew Stotz: Shocking. 0:06:38.1 John Dues: Yeah, it is pretty shocking. 0:06:38.7 Andrew Stotz: That's not happening in Asia. 0:06:40.6 John Dues: No, and it's... I think a number of places in the United States, the learning chronic absenteeism has bounced back, but in the places where you expect where there's, especially high concentrations of poverty and things like that. It's sort of remained a serious issue even depending how you mark the end of the pandemic, two or three years after the primary part of the pandemic anyway. The height of the pandemic, if you will. So, ongoing challenges for sure. So what I said was that the team was going to run this initial PDSA cycle to gather more information, of course, there were some initial thoughts on why kids were missing so much school. We've talked about these transportation, different expectations that have been set for when to stay home, family and instability, those types of things. But again, we want to further test those assumptions early on in the project. So the key question that we were looking at is, for this first PDSA cycle, at least was will the combination of a what we call an empathy interview, which is just like where we sit down with a student or the family and try to better understand what's going on, and then daily attendance tracking was the other part of this, will that lead to a modest increase in the students average daily attendance rate during the period of the intervention. 0:08:11.9 John Dues: So even though we weren't necessarily testing a change idea, there was this sort of like... We framed it as a modest intervention in terms of sitting down with the kids and then doing this daily tracking and showing them the data. And a key part of this plan phase is we had all of our team members predict what they thought would happen with the four students that we chose to have those interviews with and track the daily attendance of during Cycle 1. So we had everybody really think through, "Okay, what do we think will happen when we put this plan in place?" And that's going to be really important because when we actually run the test, we want to compare the predictions to what actually happens, and that's where a lot of the learning happens from a PDSA cycle. 0:09:02.9 Andrew Stotz: And just for the listeners or viewers out there, why is it important to do that? Some people would say just do it and find out what the result is. 0:09:12.3 John Dues: Well, if you don't take a stance basically before the intervention happens or before the plan is put in place, then there's no learning that can really happen because whatever happens happens. But you didn't sort of say, "Here's what I think's going happen." And a lot of times, we quantify that prediction, and then what you can see is the difference between those two things is not only the learning, but it's also an indication of how well you understand your system. So what I mean is, if we put an intervention in place and I say, "Okay, I think this is going to have a 15% increased impact on whatever it is, a test score or attendance in this case," and then it has no impact, then I don't have an understanding really of what's going to work to fix whatever I'm trying to fix. But if the prediction bears out and it's pretty close to what actually happens, then that means, oh, I have a pretty good grasp on what's going on in my system. Yeah, kind of makes you put a stake in the ground, and it makes you mentally when you're doing it, it makes you think. 0:10:19.0 John Dues: Look further ahead and say, "Okay, if I do this, do I actually think this is going to be effective?" And you can also see the team's thinking. Some people might think this is going to be very effective, and some people may think it's not. Some people might think it'll work with some students, but not other students, and it gives you that picture black and white before you actually run the test. 0:10:37.8 Andrew Stotz: And in academic studies, it's really important to identify your end point that you're testing for. Otherwise, you run the risk of switching your end point as you get through your research because you're grounded initially. 0:10:53.2 John Dues: Right, exactly. Right, yep, absolutely. So in this plan, what we did was, this... We had parent conferences coming up, so we just said, that's a natural time to sit down with these four students that we chose at parent conferences. So at the end of November, we did that, we reviewed the data, we sat with the family to discuss some of the causes of the attendance challenges. We explained the plan to track attendance for 15 days coming back from Thanksgiving break. And then part of the plan was collecting that quantitative data, like the actual attendance rates each day for each kid, but then it was qualitative too, because we were asking the family on the front end, what was the sort of overall cause of the problem. And then we were asking the actual student every day like, "Oh, on this particular day, why were you absent, or why were you late, why did you miss school?" And we were tracking that across 15 days, so it's a relatively short time period, 'cause we don't want to go off on some grand experiment and then find out three months from now that our intervention wasn't effective. 0:12:02.5 John Dues: So that was the plan. And then the next step in the PDSA cycle is the do and that's just like it sounds. So we ran the experiment for 15 days and then started gathering that data. So what we found was that in two of the cases, transportation challenges were in fact the primary issue, in the third case, it was sort of transportation, but that was exacerbated by a family that was homeless during this period, and then in the fourth cause, or in the fourth case, there was actually some sort of anxiety issues with coming to school. So you can see three very different causes just across four students. So again, if you don't have that picture, then it's very hard to sort of design the right type of interventions 'cause you don't really know what's going on. You have assumptions, right? So I don't think it's rocket science, but the team learn that there are so many layers to this attendance challenge, and even for a single student, there's often multiple factors rather than some single explanatory variable. And so you have to sort of uncover that, and I think the key thing was that holding these empathy interviews, just these four interviews allowed us to challenge some of our initial assumptions. Like maybe a family doesn't value attendance, that didn't seem to be the case, at least with any of these four students who are facing some serious challenges on the home front. 0:13:48.6 John Dues: But it wasn't like families didn't value school or having their kids attending school, there're just major obstacles. And so digging deeper allowed us to explore these various causes with the families. Another thing that was interesting is that as we talked with the team about... As the data came in and what they were doing, we also learned that we need a better, more systematic process for intervening with chronically absent students, that's everything from reviewing the data, identifying those chronically absent students early on in the school year, for those that we're required to do something like file truancy for those processes and then monitoring attendance, there's various requirements public schools have on that front. Every school is... They have a system in place, and they have a team in place, and they have a process in place for these different things, but they're all doing it differently, and so there's not a standardized process across our system. And another thing is, some parents didn't even realize that they may have a general idea that the attendance isn't great, but don't... Most parents don't actually realize what is the actual attendance rate of their child, how far off is it from what's considered exceptional or at least okay attendance. 0:15:17.6 John Dues: Almost nobody has that. Those numbers at the ready. Another thing that has happened as we studied the data was that there was a really wide variation in terms of the difference in student daily attendance between the period of the intervention and end of the school year up to that point. So there's basically a lot of learning going on with just a very simple four student experiment. So even though the predictions weren't perfect, and one thing with the predictions is, this is Cycle 1, so what should happen over time as we gain knowledge about our system, is that the predictions get closer and closer to what actually happens because we're learning with every PDSA cycle that we're running basically. So the last part is, then you act, so we've done the plan, we've done the do, the study, and the act, and the way I frame this is that you have three As that you can choose from in the Act segment. You can adopt that change that you've tested, you're going to adapt that into the next cycle, or you can say this is not working at all and you can abandon it and just do something else. 0:16:34.2 John Dues: Yeah, those are the three options. So what we've actually decided to do, what happens in a lot of early tests, is we're going to adapt Cycle 1 into Cycle 2, and in fact, Cycle 2 has actually already started. But the aim of Cycle 2 now is we're going to increase the extent to which we're involving students and families in the data collection process, and we're going to hold what we call like a... We call this a 5 Whys Empathy interview with each student that we've identified, and then use that to create a plan for a PDSA that's specific to that one student, basically. So it's going to be very hyper-focused and so we're going to collect this data for two weeks, we recognize that doing this intensive of a process with the entire school or the entire group of students that are chronic absent probably isn't possible, but what we're doing is learning so much from this, that seemed like we're going to take another step to learn more and work with the individual student to set up the next round of interventions. 0:17:49.4 Andrew Stotz: And what are you guys expecting for an outcome? You know, talking about prediction? I don't know. Should we think about where are you going to be in one year or two years, three years? 0:18:00.7 John Dues: Oh no. It's very closely tied with the PDSA. So if it's a two-week PDSA, then we're actually saying, what is that the average daily attendance going to be for that two-week period? 0:18:11.7 Andrew Stotz: Yep. Yep. 0:18:14.3 John Dues: I mean. It's very tightly closed. Yeah. 0:18:14.8 Andrew Stotz: What I'm saying though, let's just take the attendance levels that we've seen in the chart, let's just talk about annual and let's say, "Okay, one year from now, two years from now." 0:18:23.7 John Dues: Oh yeah. That's right. Oh I see. 0:18:26.7 Andrew Stotz: Are you... Is it right to make a prediction about where you think you would be or is that not the right way to do it? 0:18:32.0 John Dues: I think it's too early in the process to make... I see what you're saying now you're talking about the actual... That overall system measurement. Yeah, I think it's too early to make a prediction on that, if you were holding a gun to my head and making me put money down, my prediction would be right in line with what it is this year, basically. I would think it... Because it's a stable system. Those last four years, all bounce around 50-55%, like you said. So my bet would be on 50-55%. Because... 0:19:11.2 Andrew Stotz: And what would... How would things change for you or the school? Let's just imagine hypothetically... I'm going to push back a little bit here and just get some thinking, but from a hypothetical perspective, let's say a new school opened up and their number one focus was chronic absenteeism, and they decided that the most important thing for them is to solve that problem. And they had been doing it for a while in other locations, and now they've come in, now you're competing with them. They're an option for some people, and they're just the place for others, and let's just say that they have optimized for chronic absenteeism and it's down to 10% at their school. Does that change how you think about what you're doing? Again, it's hypothetical, but I'm just curious. How does that... 0:20:01.3 John Dues: No. Not me, because this is what our system produces right now, so... Yeah, I think I would say I don't have enough information to make a prediction about what the ultimate outcome measure will be. 0:20:19.4 Andrew Stotz: And I guess you could say this is what our system produces in this area based upon what we see as important, right? Like this is... 0:20:32.4 John Dues: Yeah. That's fair. 0:20:33.2 Andrew Stotz: And there may be another area that you think is very important in that those numbers in that area may be very, very different from that, but another... Go ahead. 0:20:43.7 John Dues: Yeah, well, I was going to say, so in this attendance team, there's... The empathy interview is going on with these four students, and then in the Act phase, we also said we're launching an effort to make the intervention process more consistent across all of our schools. And we're starting by understanding the process that's in place right now, but this team is not the only team pulling levers that ultimately could impact attendance. I think they're pulling important levers, but there are other improvement teams across the school system, for example, I think I mentioned this maybe a few episodes ago, transportation. Transportation did come up like we thought it would in three of the four interviews. So, and we have mentioned how poor the bussing has been in Columbus for the last several school years, but especially last year and this year. And so we're working to see can we do something significantly different next year on the transportation front. 0:22:00.1 John Dues: And I think if we can pull that lever, that also... But that would be a change to the system, like a very significant change. Now, if that went through, I would be much more confident about making a prediction about improvement on the attendance front next year, so. 0:22:17.9 Andrew Stotz: If I look... 0:22:19.2 John Dues: It's not going to solve our problems though. Yep. 0:22:21.2 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. If I look at my roasting business for coffee, if I replace my pretty much manual roasting machine with a fully automated high-tech one, it's going to have a massive improvement in variability. Invariability is going to reduce way beyond what our current system can produce and it will happen in a day, right? When that happens, it'll happen in a day. 0:22:47.4 John Dues: Yeah. 0:22:52.9 Andrew Stotz: And being late for class is a big bag-a-boo of teachers here in Thailand, particularly at universities where I go to, and it's a problem and nobody likes it and students come in late and all that. But I solved that problem with just the twist of my finger, one twist of my fingers, and I solved it. What was that twist? I locked the door. And then as the students were outside waiting to come inside, I would eventually go out and I'd say, "Look, it's important to me that you're on time. I'm going to lock this door. If you can't make it... You got to figure out how to make it." I know you got two hours of traffic and you're coming in from abroad, or you're coming in from outside of the city, I know that your parents don't have the money to pay for a car for you and you got to take the subway or you've got... I know. Everybody's got their circumstances, but you're making an effort to get here, I want you to get here on time. 0:23:52.4 Andrew Stotz: The next class that I have, everybody's on time. So one of the questions I have, and this is, again, push back is, some people may look at this and go, "Oh. Come on. All this work. Why don't we just massively prioritize and focus." Let's just say that... Let's just say, I don't know what the answer is, but let's just say that the principle of the school, all the teachers and all the students gather out in the front area at the time that you're supposed to be at school, and there's a band playing. Everybody's cheering. We're getting ready. Whatever that thing is. I remember a boss I had that used to have a stand-up meeting every single morning, and you didn't miss it. And so for some people who are listening, they may think, "Oh, come on, John, you're going through all this stuff and it's not going to improve. Why aren't you just taking more aggressive action right now." 0:24:48.9 John Dues: Well, I didn't say I was going to improve it, I just said I wasn't going to make a prediction. 0:24:51.9 Andrew Stotz: Yes. Yes. Sorry. I didn't mean... 0:24:53.8 John Dues: So yeah. What would I say? I think when you have... So the person that is in charge of this project, for example, I don't know that anybody's ever gotten better results while a principal of a school in Ohio with the challenges that he faced. So this is not people that aren't driven to get extraordinary results. This is a multi-faceted problem that is incredibly tough to improve, and when I have the view point of sitting down with the students and hearing what is... Keep the obstacles are... It is just a very hard thing, and I'd say one of the reasons we're pulling that transportation lever early, or at least attempting to is because that's such a big part. Again, that's not going to solve everything. But like I said, if we were able to pull that lever and it's a big if because we get no funding for transportation. All the funding flows through the school district, so that's a massive obstacle. Millions of dollars that we aren't allocated to do this service, someone else is. So right now we don't have control over it, and so those are the types of obstacles, we can't just buy buses, for example. Because... 0:26:36.1 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And it's like you got 50 problems that you're trying to... 0:26:41.7 John Dues: 50 problems. 0:26:41.7 Andrew Stotz: And 50 more constraints that you're operating within. 0:26:45.9 John Dues: Yeah. And so we were attacking it from multiple angles, so we were attacking it on the attendance front with kids, at the State House with funding, with trying to see if we can set up our own transportation system even without that funding. So there's many, many levers being attempted, but they are not quick and easy, simple, so. 0:27:12.8 Andrew Stotz: And for a listener who's listening to this, who may not be the CEO of a company, let's say who's got resources he can allocate or she can allocate, they also may be in a situation like, "This is all I can impact. I can impact this area, but I have to be realistic about what resources I have." 0:27:33.6 John Dues: Yeah, and I think one of the things we're doing too, we don't have rose colored glasses on, we're saying, even if we did fix this transportation system, and that's a big if again. That doesn't mean that the chronic absenteeism problem is going to be solved. Maybe it's significantly better, maybe it goes down to 30%, 35%, if we had a good transportation system, but that still means... And even before transportation was such an issue, even before the pandemic, these rates were still... The quarter of the kids who are so chronically absent, that's way too high, that's way too high. So we recognize that, but these are very, very thorny problems to try to improve. 0:28:15.0 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. Well, and also you're trying to make lasting change too, so. 0:28:18.6 John Dues: Lasting change. Yeah. 0:28:19.6 Andrew Stotz: Yep. 0:28:19.7 John Dues: Yep. Yeah. 0:28:22.1 Andrew Stotz: Okay. Great. So I'm going to wrap it up there. And thanks... 0:28:23.3 John Dues: Yeah. Absolutely. 0:28:24.6 Andrew Stotz: And thank you for, on behalf of the Deming Institute, and I want to encourage all the listeners out there to follow what John's doing and what he's talking about, and of course, go to Deming.org to continue your journey. You can get his book, Win-Win, W. Edwards Deming, The System of Profound Knowledge and the Science of Improving Schools on amazon.com. And this is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, people are entitled to joy in work.

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

Join John Dues and Andrew Stotz as they go one step deeper into finding the precise problem you want to improve. Sometimes taking big actions means starting small. TRANSCRIPT Diving Deeper into Defining the Problem: Path for Improvement (Part 6) 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. And the topic for today is more on defining the problem. John, take it away. 0:00:23.5 John Dues: It's good to be back, Andrew. Yeah, so it's been a minute, but two episodes ago we just kind of refreshed. We discussed how helpful it is to make sure we see the system in which we work whenever we're starting an improvement project. And then in this last episode, we took the sort of next step and we started working towards defining a specific problem. And like you said, we're going to dive deeper into that topic today. For those that have been following along, you'll remember that we've been walking through this four step improvement model. Step one, set the challenge or direction. Two is grasp the current condition. Three is establish your target condition, and four, experiment to overcome obstacles. And then again, we've said repeatedly, we're doing all of these steps with this team that has three parts. 0:01:18.1 John Dues: The people working in the system, again, for us, that's teachers and students a lot of the time, and then those that have the authority to work on the system, that might be a principal, that might be a teacher depending on the project, maybe it's the superintendent, if it's the whole system. And then this System of Profound Knowledge coach is that third part that's often missing, at least in school improvement. So we have this nice model and this nice graphic. And then what we've also been sort of layering on top of that is this improvement process. 0:01:48.9 John Dues: So in each of these steps in the model, we have a number of steps that we're taking to be able to sort of achieve that. One of the things though, that sort of like a key organizing question in step one in the model is we asked where do we want to be in the long run, right? And so we're thinking through this longer range goal, typically in the timeframe of something like six months to three years. And if we achieve this, it's really going to differentiate us from other schools in our case or maybe businesses or hospitals or whatever it may be. And we've also sort of said that this is a stretch goal and it's at the outset we don't know how to achieve it. It almost seems impossible. 0:02:31.8 John Dues: And so for us, the key thing we're working on at United Schools here in Columbus is that we've have this really high chronic absenteeism rate coming out of the pandemic, and we have a goal to get that down much lower. So right now, about 50% of our kids are chronically absent. And I think I've said this before, we're trying to get that down to closer to something like 5%. So it's a pretty, pretty weighty problem and a pretty, very ambitious goal, I would say. 0:03:04.3 Andrew Stotz: Yep. 0:03:06.7 John Dues: So last time, what we said was, at this stage in the process, we've stepped back, we looked at some tools that help us see the system, and now we're doing that same thing for defining the problem. And we talked about there's some really useful questions to ask at this stage. The first one that we talked about as a group is how is the project being funneled from a general to more specific problem? We start with this sort of broad problem about chronic absenteeism, and we're trying to narrow the specific problem that we're going to work on. And then once we have that narrower view, we'll get all the way down and answer the question, what is the precise problem statement? And that's kind of our focus for today. 0:03:57.8 John Dues: Now, we won't get to the precise problem statement today, but we're trying to figure out the things that we need to do to get there. So last episode, I reviewed a tool we use at this step in the process called a Problem Statement Readiness Check. So we wrote this problem focus area, and this is really important. I've repeated this like, we use these tools because it helps us organize the group's thoughts and put it into writing. And that's really, really powerful. So we wrote this problem focus area, this sort of broader sort of characterization of the problem as we see it. 0:04:34.4 John Dues: And then we just listed out, what have we learned so far? What insights have we gained? And then we also listed a number of questions that still needed to be answered. And then we basically, as a group, we have this improvement team that meets weekly on Friday mornings. Then we filtered all that learning through six questions. First question is, has our team investigated multiple perspectives on the problem focus area? And actually, in the document, we write our evidence, and then we say, do we feel like the evidence is weighty enough that we've met the standard of that question, yes or no? So that particular question, we check no. 0:05:20.6 John Dues: The second question was, have you challenged assumptions our team held about why the problem occurs? And again, we've done some of that, but we were like, overall I don't think we've challenged enough of those assumptions. So we checked no for that question as well. And then we said, have you gained useful insight into why previous efforts haven't been successful? And we said no to that one. 0:05:45.7 John Dues: And the last two questions were, has your team gained sufficient insight into student needs to give you confidence that you know which kinds of improvements will lead to improved student experiences outcomes? Said no to that one. And then the last question was, have you identified existing school based practices or processes connected to the problem that might be improved? And for that one we said yes. And so again, there's no right or wrong answers here. But by having these six questions, a key sort of step at this point is down at the bottom it says, if the team checks three or more boxes, we'll move on to draft the problem statement, that precise problem statement. And if the team hasn't checked at least three yeses, then we're not going to do that. We sort of feel like if we haven't answered at least half of those questions to our satisfaction, then there's probably some more learning that needs to happen. So in this case, this is... Oh, sorry, go ahead. 0:06:42.5 Andrew Stotz: I wanted to ask because I know sometimes people probably would sit in something like this and they're like, come on, why do we have to go through all this? We know what the problem is, let's go, let's solve it now. What is the risk if you skip this type of stuff? 0:07:00.4 John Dues: Well, and that's... Interestingly, this group is mainly made up of a couple principals, a couple deans on the dean of student side or we have these dean of family and community engagements that are really involved with families especially that have attendance issues. There's a couple people that are sort of like attendance officers and then there's a couple sort of systems leaders, myself and another guy. And in this group, you don't actually have a lot of that. Where you get a lot of that type of thing is when you have the CEO or the superintendent in the room and there's a lot of urgency and pressure on those folks coming from different constituencies. But the problem is if you don't sort of slow down and study it and do that thoroughly, then what happens is you move forward. The solutions are miss, sort of, aligned to the problem and you end up wasting resources, time, money, whatever. 0:07:57.9 Andrew Stotz: And I guess you lose credibility too, that you go back and say, okay, now we're going to do our next thing. Well, we didn't really really succeed with our last one. 0:08:07.6 John Dues: Yeah. And in education, especially urban education, but in education generally, the average urban superintendent is at the helm for about three years. And so what happens is that they then turn over and there's a whole nother set of initiatives that the new person brings. And we call this initiative fatigue, where you constantly have these initiatives. Most of the people on the front line know these things aren't going to work from the outset because it's not the real problems that they're seeing in their classrooms and they sort of have to go along to get along type of deal. But over time, you just sort of wear people out and then they stop really trying that improvement. But with this team, what we're doing, we have the people that are on the ground sort of dealing with these attendance issues day to day, and they're a part of building the solution. So they have a lot of investment, I think, in developing the solution on the front end. 0:09:02.6 Andrew Stotz: A little corollary to that is the idea of family businesses versus public companies. In family businesses in Asia and particularly, which I'm familiar with, they have an amazing ability to have continuity in senior leadership in the values and that type of thing that you see is very hard to have in public company unless they're run by the founder and the founders... And it's... And the founder's been running it for 20 years or whatever. 0:09:29.5 John Dues: Yeah. 0:09:29.9 Andrew Stotz: In fact, I see in my own coffee business that just the fact that my business partner, the founder, has been running it for 30 years brings something that our competitors don't have. 0:09:40.3 John Dues: Yep, absolutely. And stability that... Sorry. Sorry, go ahead. 0:09:44.8 Andrew Stotz: No, I mean, and that can become a competitive advantage. And so I was just curious too about public versus private schools. I'm assuming that private schools in America have more ability to have the continuity of leadership or is that not the case? 0:10:03.9 John Dues: Well, I don't know. I mean, I wouldn't have the data to say, one way or the other. I would suspect that in a private setting there may be more leadership stability. I mean, the other thing that you're having to deal with in a public school system, most public school systems, traditional public school systems especially, is there's a publicly elected board that those five or seven people are who the superintendent reports to and those people they turn over as elections occur on a staggered basis. And so, yeah, I mean, getting that continuity is really, really tough. And so I think finding especially of larger districts, especially of urban districts, finding that continuity of leadership, especially at the superintendent level, is very difficult for those reasons. 0:10:58.4 Andrew Stotz: So I'm going to stop and talk for just a second about that because one of the lessons I've learned in business and in life is that when you identify that everybody's doing this thing and they're all kind of bound by this and they're stuck in this situation, that is your opportunity to differentiate. 0:11:12.8 John Dues: Yeah. 0:11:13.3 Andrew Stotz: Once you identify that point, everything you can do, knowing they're tangled up in this problem, in this mess that they cannot break free from unless they have a huge amount of political will or force of will, then you know that if you could do something differently, you would be able to differentiate your school, your business, your social enterprise or whatever it is. So it's a great little trigger to something I'm always looking for in business. 0:11:40.4 John Dues: Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. That continuity of leadership is a key differentiator if you can have stable leadership. No doubt. It's hard to get anything done if you don't, especially in a complex system. But in this particular case, as you would imagine, if five of the six answers to those questions were no, we didn't do enough study yet or we don't have enough understanding yet then the team obviously concluded that we didn't have enough information to write a precise problem statement. And this is where I talk to people because we do have this improvement model. And then it's under that is this improvement process. And there are steps, but it's not a recipe. 0:12:19.1 John Dues: So you can't just go from step one to two to three to four and four to five. And some people sort of get that and some people don't like that messier process. And this is sort of where the art comes in. But one of the key tools in this case that we're using, and we've talked about it before, is we don't have enough information. Typically, we start running experiments later in the process, PDSA cycles, Plan, Do Study, Act cycles. When we have a set of solutions, we want to start testing them. But there's other times you can use PDSA. I actually recommend doing this pretty early in the process when you need to gather more information or run a mini experiment. That's the perfect time, no matter what step it is, to run a PDSA cycle and start to gather that information, because otherwise, with this process, it can become a little disconnected. You can talk about things forever. 0:13:15.4 John Dues: And so you do wanna think, you do wanna slow down, you wanna be deliberate, but you also wanna run some tests right away and start small and start to learn some things that will later on inform the full set of interventions you're going to try or the full set of solutions you're going to try. So that's what we did in this particular case where we didn't feel like we had enough information to write the problem statement, we said, let's stop and let's run a PDSA cycle. So I'll just kind of walk through the objective of this first cycle. So we ran this right before break. 0:13:51.9 John Dues: So we ran it for 20 days right before our winter break, so sort of like the second half of December. And so the objective of this particular PDSA and this is sort of will take us to the end of this episode is, we already know that there's this high percentage of students that have significant attendance challenges. We know that average daily attendance across our four campuses is somewhere between 85 and 88%, and chronic absenteeism is somewhere in the low 40% range. So that's information we've started to gather. We know all that. We know there's this problem. But while the attendance team, they have some definite thoughts on what's causing so many students to miss so much school, things we've talked about, transportation, health, family instability. But we really wanted to test those assumptions early on through this structured format, this structured PDSA cycle. 0:14:56.4 John Dues: And so what we did... And again, especially at the start, if it's the first cycle in a project, you want to have a pretty narrow focus. So with this PDSA cycle, what we're going to do is... Or what we did was we picked one student. Sounds kind of crazy. You got all these students you need to help. But we picked one student at each campus. And so we have this improvement team that has people from each campus. And we said, what's a student that you'd want to dig into and learn some more about that's having attendance issues? And there's no shortage of students to pick. But what we settled on was the kind of the frame was, here are four students that are having attendance issues. And we've had trouble really figuring out what the cause is. 0:15:43.5 John Dues: So if we're going to focus on just one student on our campus, let's pick one where we've had some struggles to find additional information. So what we did was, pick those four students, and then we started tracking their attendance very closely over those three weeks of the PDSA cycle. And we came up with a system to categorize every single absence event. And it was a sort of predetermined list, like a validated list, so that it was kind of a balance between having simply qualitative perceptions of why kids are absent and we didn't want to just have like five reasons either that they need some more detail. You actually don't know enough if you just put transportation. 0:16:30.7 John Dues: So we ended up with about a list of about 20 or so, and that kind of got adjusted at the start of the cycle. And then what we did was, we sat down and talked with those students and their families, every one of those four. So the team, the school based team, there was a point person or two that sat down and kind of dug into the attendance challenges with the students and their parents and started categorizing and adding context to the various absences that had happened up to that point in the year. And then also across those three weeks, right? 0:17:07.1 John Dues: And then a key part of this is, so we kind of outline that as an objective. And then we said, okay, while this isn't like a really intense attendance intervention, it is an intervention to sit down and talk with people and try to categorize and problem solve a little bit about what the problems are and how might the parent get the kid to school over those next three weeks. 0:17:31.0 John Dues: So at this point, one of the things that we did, and this is where we'll pick back up next week or the next time we talk with the plan is, we had our team members predict, what do you think is gonna happen when we sit down and have these conversations? And do you think the conversations in and of themselves are gonna impact the students attendance rates? And I think that's a good place to pick up in our next conversation. It was pretty fascinating, the first experiment, actually. So I think listeners will get a lot out of hearing those results in our next session. 0:18:10.8 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, it's exciting as we've gone through this, thinking about how we can apply all this into, I've been taking tons of notes from our discussions on this, and I know the other listeners and viewers are to try to think about how do we adjust our own way of even thinking about improvement. And I know from my perspective, I think I would argue that my discussions with you have helped me to slow down in my improvement process. 0:18:40.7 John Dues: Yeah, I think that's often... I mean, because there's so much urgency to... And whatever our business area is, urgency to get it right, urgency to change, urgency to improve. But like what I see in schools, schools have an attendance problem. And I'm sure there's some schools that do a really good job on this front. But a lot of schools, what they're going to do is they're going to have some type of attendance incentive. We're going to have pizza party Fridays if you came all week. Might that have some short term impact? Maybe. But you're not solving the actual problems that are leading to the attendance challenges in the first place. So... 0:19:20.7 Andrew Stotz: In my online Valuation Masterclass Bootcamp, one of the big improvements that I've worked on is I've realized that I don't think we've defined the assignments as well as we could. And so I'm looking at the outcome and I'm thinking, the outcome isn't what I want. I want it better. And then I realize I've got to go back. And all of a sudden, two bootcamps ago, it made me realize I need to actually physically separate the lecture on the assignment. 0:19:54.5 Andrew Stotz: And so I've now, for every week of the six weeks on Mondays, I release a video and I say, this is your assignment and here's all the questions you're going to have. But more importantly, what I always do is I say, this is what it should look like. This is from the prior best example from last class. And all I ask of you is to try to beat this. 0:20:21.3 John Dues: That's great. Yeah. 0:20:22.5 Andrew Stotz: And then students are inspired and they're seeing, you could say, well, you just giving them the... You're giving them the result, okay, so my students are doing studies on industry in particular, what I'm talking about like the automotive industry. So they may see a prior students that just got an A plus, they were great. I don't give grades in the bootcamp, but let's say it's A plus work. Great. I'm happy to show them that and let them see that and say, now I want to challenge you to do better. 0:20:49.3 Andrew Stotz: And I think that is another addition. And I'm finding we're getting a lot less questions. The only questions we're getting from the people that haven't watched that video, if they haven't watched the assignment video, then they have all these questions. But also what's fascinating is that what we're seeing is a much improved outcome. And all of a sudden, as a teacher, on our feedback Fridays, when the students are presenting their work of the week, I'm spending a lot less time going, wait a minute, you got a grammar mistake in there or you got this or that or all that stuff's gone and now I'm focusing on the quality of their logic and their argument and that type of thing, which is exactly what I want to be doing. So just the idea of constantly improving is just so exciting. 0:21:35.2 John Dues: Yeah, I think... And I think a lot of people on our team have this natural inclination to sit down... Want to sit down with families, spend time with them and problem solve some of these issues. But when you zoom out and look at the problem and how big it is, you don't know where to start. So this gave people a place. One student, like, have one longer... I know we can't do this probably with all our kids across the entire school, but let's do this with one student and see what we learn and then use that learning to build the next cycle. And that's really what this is about, is that the power of the PDSA at any point in the improvement process, whether it's testing intervention or in a scenario like this where you need to get more information before you go on to the next step. I think PDSA can be used at any time of an improvement project. 0:22:27.9 Andrew Stotz: Wonderful. Well, John, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion and for listeners. Remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. You can find John's book, Win Win: W. Edwards Deming, the System of Profound Knowledge and the Science of Improving Schools on Amazon.com and this is your host, Andrew Stotz. And I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming. People are entitled to joy in work.

Cliff Norman, a quality improvement expert and co-author, and Dr. David M. Williams, a quality leader in healthcare, delve into transforming quality from a compliance task to a strategic advantage. They share valuable insights from Dr. Deming's teachings and discuss their five-activity framework that drives sustainable success. The conversation uncovers challenges organizations face in changing their quality approach, the importance of engaging people in improvement efforts, and the need to align strategies with customer needs for true innovation.

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

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

Join Bill Bellows and Andrew Stotz as they discuss what actions (or inactions) make us worse than thieves and how that relates to expiration dates, and acceptability vs desirability. Plus, stories about job swapping, Achieving Competitive Excellence, and birthdays. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 31 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. Today is Episode 9, and it's entitled "Worse Than a Thief." Bill, take it away. 0:00:27.2 Bill Bellows: Welcome, Andrew. I haven't seen you in a while, and great to be back. 0:00:29.1 AS: It's been a while. 0:00:32.0 BB: Here we are. Episode 9 already. Gosh, [chuckle] time flies when we're having fun. First, let me say a shout out to people who are reaching out to me on LinkedIn. I spoke with another one of them this afternoon. It's always exciting to connect with them. And then I ideally connect in a regular basis and help them as best I can, and learn from them as best I can. 0:01:03.0 AS: Yep. 0:01:03.2 BB: So, for those who are thinking about it, they keep hearing you say, "Hey, you know how to reach Bill? Find him on LinkedIn." So, a reminder for those who are waiting for a nudge, here's a nudge. So, "Worse than a thief" is an expression that Dr. Taguchi used when he say, Andrew, "Don't be worse than a thief." And we'll get to that, but let me just give our audience some context on that. 0:01:37.8 AS: Yep. 0:01:39.0 BB: Dr. Taguchi would say... And actually, I don't know if Dr. Taguchi explained it. Someone explained it to me this way. He said a thief could be someone who steals your wallet, finds $20; which means they're up 20, you're down 20; which people refer to as "zero sum gain." Right? So, the thief's gain is my loss, zero sum. What could be worse than that? Well, "worse than a thief" would be a situation where what someone gains is nothing compared to what I lose. A simple example is, [chuckle] I'm not the only one who does this, but if I'm going to the supermarket and I get out of the car and I see a nail in the parking lot or a piece of glass in the parking lot on my way in. So, I'm not talking about walking all around the parking lot. I'm talking about if on my way into the store I see a nail, something that could puncture a foot, a tire, and I spend a few seconds to pick it up, throw it in the trash can right by the door, then my theory is the reason I do that, the reason others do that, is the belief that that little bit of time that I am spending doing that could potentially save someone far more than the few seconds it took me. 0:03:20.9 BB: Well, "worse than a thief" would be, I see that broken bottle, let's say a bunch of shards of glass. And having worked at my father's gas station, I've seen... A nail on a tire is one thing. Nail creates a puncture. A piece of glass in a tire creates a fracture. A piece of glass can destroy a tire 'cause you get a crack and it spreads, and that's hard to repair. A puncture with a nail, yeah, it's inconvenient, but that doesn't destroy the tire. So, I'm overly sensitive when I see pieces of glass in a parking lot, that that could ruin a tire. 0:04:04.8 AS: And ruin a day. 0:04:06.2 BB: Ruin a day, oh yeah. And so the idea is that for someone to not take the time, and the time they save cost you more than they saved, that's worse than a thief. 0:04:19.8 AS: Right. 0:04:20.0 BB: So, if I meet a set of requirements, leave the bowling ball in the doorway, deliver minimally, but in the world of acceptability, what do we call that, Andrew? It's good. 0:04:35.3 AS: It's good. 0:04:36.0 BB: Right? It's good. It's just within requirements, but good. 0:04:41.8 AS: It's not beyond looking good. 0:04:43.9 BB: And forget about beyond looking good; this is looking good. So, I leave the bowling ball in the doorway. I deliver to you the absolute minimum, which is still good. So, your response to that, Andrew, is, "Thank you, Bill." [chuckle] 0:05:00.0 AS: Yeah. 0:05:00.1 BB: And I'm not saying you know what I did, but let's say the situation where I am unaware of the loss function. I'm unaware that what I'm doing is make making your life worse. 0:05:12.2 AS: Right. 0:05:13.3 BB: But the idea is that my shortcut to deliver the D minus; D minus, minus, minus, minus, minus. 'Cause that's still not an F. What Taguchi is talking about is that the amount of resources I save, may be a fraction of what it cost you in terms of extra effort to use it. So, my savings of an hour, a minute, a second causing you far more than I saved, is worse than a thief. But in the world of acceptability, there is no such thing. In the world of acceptability, a little bit within requirements on the low side, a little bit within requirements on the high side, it's all the same. Again, there may be a situation where if you're putting a shelf on a piece of wood on a wall as a shelf and it's a little bit longer, a little bit long on either side, that may not have an impact; may not be touching anything on either side. It doesn't have to fit in. 0:06:25.9 BB: Now, this past weekend, our son and I were installing a new floor at our daughter's condo, and we wanted the pieces to fit in-between other pieces and this laminate floor which is a [chuckle] lot of work. Our son is turning into quite the artist when it comes to woodworking and things. But it's very precise getting things just right, just right, just right. And that attention to detail, that attention to making sure the gaps are just right, minding the gap and not the part. And there were pieces of this floor that he was trying to install. And it was driving him nuts, and finally... He's trying to figure it out and he finally figured it out what was going on. 'Cause he wanted that floor and the spacing between not just to meet requirements [chuckle] not that our daughter gave him and set the requirement, but he wanted the floor in those gaps to be invisible. He wanted things to... Right? He had a higher level, a higher standard. 0:07:25.3 BB: Now, this is the same kid who when he was 13 left the bowling ball in the doorway. But I would've done that. You would've done that. So, anyway, that's the difference between... Another reminder of, one, the difference between acceptability and desirability. But to add to this idea of "worse than a thief," embedded in the concept of desirability is not to be worse than a thief, is to understand the consequences of your action on others, and the amount of time and your decision on how you deliver it and how you meet the requirements. The idea is that, the less time you take in order to save at your end might be causing the person downstream in your organization more than you're saving. 0:08:22.8 AS: In other words, something small, you could adjust something small that would have a huge impact down the line, and you just didn't... You don't know about it. 0:08:32.2 BB: Again, that's why I go back to the nail in the parking lot. To not pick up the nail could cause someone so much more than the few seconds you didn't spend. But again, that could be... [overlapping conversation] 0:08:44.0 AS: And one of the things that makes it easier or better for a working environment is you know your downstream. 0:08:51.8 BB: Yes. 0:08:51.8 AS: When you're walking in the parking lot, you don't know your downstream; it's just anybody generally, and hopefully I've stopped something from happening here, but you're never gonna know and all that. But with a business, you know your downstream, you know your upstream, and that communication can produce a really, really exciting result because you can see it and feel it. 0:09:11.8 BB: Well, and thank you for bringing that up, because I've got notes from... Since the last time we met, I keep a file for the next sessions we're gonna do. And so as things, ideas come up from people that I'm meeting on LinkedIn or elsewhere, then I, "Oh, let me throw that in." And so I throw it into a Word file for the next time. And so somewhere, I can't remember who, but since the last time we spoke, someone shared with me... Hold on, let me find it here. Okay. In their organization, they do staff rotation. They move people around in their organization. And the question had to do with, "Isn't that what Dr. Deming would promote? Is having people move around the organization?" And I said... Hold on, I gotta sneeze. I said, "Well, if I am the person that makes the parts that you have to assemble, and I make them just within requirements unaware of the downstream impact... " I don't know where they are within the requirements, let's say. 0:10:30.0 BB: All I know is that they're acceptable. I machine it, I measure it, the inspection says it's good, I don't know where within it's good. I don't know. So, I'm unaware. All I know is that it met the requirements. And I hand off to you on a regular basis, and then the boss comes along and says, "Bill, I wanna have you go do Andrew's job." So, now, I'm on the receiving end. And maybe you are upstream doing what I used to do. And you are likewise unaware that... You don't know that you're delivering acceptability. All you know is all the parts you deliver are good. You're trained the same way I'm trained, I'm doing your job. Does that change anything? [chuckle] If I take on your job and let's say, banging it together, whereas the week before you were banging it together, does that rotation create the conversation? 0:11:27.2 AS: So, you're saying rotation for the sake of rotation is not necessarily valuable if in fact, what could be more value is just the two of us sitting down and saying, "So what is it that you're doing with yours and what do you need?" and maybe visiting the other side or something like that. 0:11:44.9 BB: My point is, until the thought occurs to either one of us on the distinction between acceptable and desirable, neither one of us is the wiser as to why we do what we do. So, having people move around the organization and take on different roles, absent an understanding of this contrast, absent an understanding of what Dr. Deming is talking about, which includes these distinctions, that's not gonna do anything. 0:12:16.0 AS: Right. 0:12:16.8 BB: I would say it's a nice idea, and you hear about that all the time about oh the CEO's gonna go work at the front desk. But if the CEO goes to the front desk, again, unless he or she has a sense of what could be, that things could be smoother than what they are because of where they've worked before and it's so much smoother over there, that could lead to why at the Atlanta office does it take so much longer than the LA office. Now I'm beginning to wonder what might be causing that difference. But if I just take on your job for the first time, or if you and I every other week change jobs. So, I'm doing your job, we are both doing assembly, we're both making the parts. Absent an understanding of the contrast between a Deming environment or a non-Deming environment, which would include an appreciation of what Dr. Deming would call the System of Profound Knowledge and the elements of psychology and systems and variation, the theory of knowledge, just not enough. Insufficient. Nice idea. But it's when at Rocketdyne we would call "reforming." 0:13:39.0 BB: And we started 'cause Russ... Dr. Deming talks about transformation, and Russ talks about reforming. And so I started thinking, "How would I explain what... " I just thought it was too... My interpretation of what Dr. Deming is saying of the individual transform will begin to see things differently, okay. My interpretation is, I begin to hear things differently, I begin to hear the contrast between somebody referring to their son as "their son" versus "our son," my idea versus our idea; I start paying attention to pronouns, so I start hearing things differently; I start to think about, see things as a system a little... I become more aware, visually more aware. 0:14:43.9 BB: And to me, another aspect I think about relative to transformation is that, if I'm the professor and you're the student in a class, or in any situation, I don't see... I think about how I've contributed to whatever it is you're doing. I have somehow created the headache that you're experiencing. If I'm upstream of you in the organization, whether that's me delivering a report or a tool, or I'm the professor delivering the lecture, I began to realize that your issues I've created, and I begin to see things as a... I begin to see that I am part of the issue, Part of the solution, part of the problem. When I explained to students this, I began to realize as a professor that I am not an observer of your learning, asking "How did you do on the exam?" I am a participant in your learning, saying "How did we do in the lecture?" And to me, that's all part of this transformation. 0:15:53.0 BB: Now, the other word, "reform," which is associated with things I've heard from Russ. He talks about... Yeah, I'll just pause there. But I started thinking, well, Deming's talking about how I see the world, how I begin to see relationships differently, think about variation differently. That's a personal transformation. Reforming, and others began to explain to people at Rocketdyne and I do with clients and students is, reforming is when you and I swap jobs. Reforming is when I look at the process and get rid of a few steps. Reforming is changing titles. Reforming is painting something, [chuckle] changing the color. I think I shared, maybe in the first podcast series, I was doing a multi-day, one-on-one seminar with a pediatrician in Kazakhstan, who came to London to meet me and a bunch of other friends to learn more about Dr. Deming's work. And the entire thing was done through a translator. 0:17:07.1 BB: And so I would ask a question in English, it would be translated to Russian then back to me in English. And so at some point, I said to Ivan Klimenko, a wonderful, wonderful guy. I said, "Ivan," I said [chuckle] to Yuri, the translator, I said, "Ask Ivan, what's the fastest way for a Red Pen Company, a non-Deming company, a "Me" organization, to become a Blue Pen Company, otherwise known as a Deming company or "We" organization." And these are terms that we talked about in the first series; I don't think in this series. But, anyway, I said, "So what's the fastest way for a non-Deming company to become a Deming company? A Red Pen Company to become a Blue Pen Company?" 0:17:44.9 BB: And so he asked, and I'm listening to the translation. And he says, "Okay, I give up." I said, "Spray paint." [chuckle] And that's what reforming is: Getting out the red spray paint, having things become neat, clean, and organized, and you're just going through the motions. There's no change of state. And so, "I do your job, you do my job," that's not sufficient. But get us to think about the contrast of a Deming and a non-Deming organization, then you and I changing roles could be enormously beneficial as I begin to understand what it's like to be on the receiving end. Now, we're talking. And I think I mentioned in a previous podcast, I had a woman attend one of the classes I did at Rocketdyne, and she said, "Bill, in our organization, we have compassion for one another." It's the same thing. It's not sufficient. And that's me saying, "Andrew, I feel really bad. I lost a lot of sleep last night thinking about how much time you spend banging together all those parts that I give you. And if there was anything I could do to make things better, I would love to help you. But at the end of the day, Andrew, all the parts I gave you are good, right? I don't give you bad stuff, right? Have I ever given you a defective part, Andrew?" 0:19:12.0 AS: Nope. 0:19:13.1 BB: "So, everything's good, right? Everything's good that I give you? Well, then, if I could help you, but I don't know what else to do. Everything I give you is good. So, it must be on your end." [laughter] [overlapping conversation] 0:19:24.1 AS: And I'm busy. Yeah. 0:19:26.6 BB: Must be on you. And that's what I'm talking about. Now, if I understand that I'm contributing to your headache, I'm contributing to the trouble you're having with an example, now I'm inspired; now I understand there's something on me. [chuckle] But, short of that, nice idea, it's not helping. 0:19:50.0 BB: [laughter] So, the story I wanted to share before we're talking about this role-changing. Again, role-changing by itself, nah, not sufficient. So, see if this sounds familiar. It has to do with acceptability. I'm pretty certain it's part of the first series. I wanna make sure it's part of the second series. So, I was in a seminar at Rocketdyne on something to do with quality. And I think United Technologies had purchased Rocketdyne. They were bringing to us their new quality management system. Not just any quality management system, Andrew. This was called ACE, A-C-E. And, when we first learned about this, I remember being in a room when their United Technologies, ACE experts started to explain it. And some of my colleagues said, "Well, what is ACE?" They said, "Well, it's Achieving Competitive Excellence." "Well, what is it? What is it, 'competitive... '" 0:20:52.2 AS: It sounds like you wanna put that up on the wall as a slogan. 0:20:56.0 BB: It was a slogan, "Achieving Competitive Excellence." And people says, "Well, what is it?" I said, "Well, it's Lean Six Sigma." Well, so why do you call it ACE? Well, our arch rivals, General Electric. they call it Lean Six Sigma. We ain't gonna call it Lean Six Sigma. So, we're calling it ACE, A-C-E, Achieving Competitive Excellence. But it's the same thing as Lean Six Sigma. [chuckle] And so we had all this mandatory ACE training that we would all sit through and pray that the rosters were never lost, were never lost so we wouldn't have to take the training again. So, in the training, there was a discussion of, how does the environment impact quality? And I don't know how it came up, but similar, there's a conversation about the environment could affect quality. And, so when that was raised, I think it was a question that came up. 0:21:56.9 BB: How does the environment affect quality? The physical environment: How hot it is, how cold it is. So, one of the attendees says, "I've got an example." He says, "I worked for a Boeing supplier," and it might have been, "I worked for Boeing in Australia." I know he said he worked in Australia. They made parts, big parts, very tall parts like a 15, 20... Very long section. And I think he said it had to do with the tails, part of the tail for Boeing airplane. [chuckle] He says, "When we would measure it," he said, "we knew that if we took the measurement first thing in the morning before the sun came up and it started to get hot, then there's a good chance that the length would meet requirements. And, we knew that once that part saw the heat of the sun and expanded, then it wouldn't meet requirements. So, we measured it first thing in the morning, [laughter] and that's an example of how the environment affects quality." And, my first thought when I heard that was, "You can't make that story up, that I will keep measuring it until it meets requirements." That, Andrew, is me shipping acceptability. Do I care at all about how that part is used, Andrew? [chuckle] 0:23:18.7 AS: Nope. 0:23:19.9 BB: Do I know how that part is installed? Am I watching you install it and go through all, you know, hammer it? Nope. No. Again, even if I did, would I think twice that I measured it before the sun came up and that might be causing the issue? No, that still would not occur to me. But the other thing I wanted to bring up on this, on the topic of ACE, remember what ACE stands for? 0:23:46.0 AS: Achieving Competitive... 0:23:50.0 BB: Excellence. 0:23:50.3 AS: Excellence. 0:23:51.8 BB: So, Rocketdyne was owned by United Technologies of Pratt and Whitney, division of West Palm Beach, for 10 years or so? 10 long years. ACE, ACE, ACE, ACE, ACE. So, I kept thinking, [chuckle] I said to some of my Deming colleagues, "There's gotta be another acronym which is A-C-E." Achieving Competitive... What? What might be another E word? 'Cause it's not... Instead of ACE, Achieving Competitive Excellence, I kept thinking of this, what might be another way of what this is really all about? And it dawned me. The embarrassment is how long it took me to come up with what ACE translated to. And it was "Achieving Compliance Excellence." [chuckle] 0:24:42.9 AS: Excellent. 0:24:45.0 BB: Does it meet requirements? Yes. And so what is compliance excellence? It gets us back to acceptability. So, traditional quality compliance. But then while I was on the thought of Achieving Compliance Excellence, and then, well, there's a place for meeting requirements. There's a place for compliance excellence. I'm not throwing it out the window. I would say, if I ask you, Andrew, how far it is to the closest airport and you say 42 miles, 42 kilometers, or you say it takes an hour, then embedded in that model is "A minute is a minute, an hour is an hour, a mile is a mile, and all the miles are the same." Well, maybe they aren't. Maybe they aren't. Maybe I'm walking that distance, and I'm going uphill and downhill. Maybe I'm driving that distance. And those changes in elevation don't matter as much. So, then, what I thought was, there's Achieving Compliance Excellence that's acceptability, and then there's Achieving Contextual Excellence, which is my understanding of the context. 0:25:56.7 BB: And given my understanding of the context, if you say to me, "How far is it to the nearest airport?" I say, "Well, tell me more about the context of your question. Are you driving there? Are you riding your bike there? Are you walking there?" 'Cause then I'm realizing that every mile with Compliance Excellence, I just treat it as "a mile is a mile is a mile." They're all interchangeable, they're all the same. With Contextual Excellence, the context matters. And I say to you, "That's a... I mean, 42 miles, but boy, every mile is... They're brutal." And so then just the idea that context matters, that the understanding of a system matters. All right. So, next thing I wanna get to, and we've talked about this before but we never got it in, but I wanna provide, I really... Well, what I think is a neat example. [laughter] Okay. Calm down, Bill. [laughter] 0:26:54.8 AS: Yeah. You're excited about it. 0:26:57.0 BB: All right. 0:26:57.1 AS: So, about your idea... [chuckle] 0:27:00.2 BB: All right. So, again, in this spirit, my aim in conversation with you is to provide insights to people trying to bring these ideas to their organization. They're either trying to improve their own understanding, looking for better ways to explain it to others. And towards that end, here is a keeper. And for those who try this, if you have trouble, get back to me. Let me know how it goes. Here's the scenario I give people, and I've done this many, many times. What I used to do is give everyone in the room a clear transparency. That's when you had overhead projectors. [chuckle] 'Cause people say, "What is a transparency? What is an overhead projector?" [overlapping conversation] 0:27:45.0 AS: Yeah exactly. 0:27:46.8 BB: It's a clear piece of plastic, like the size of a sheet of paper. And on that sheet, on that piece of plastic was a vertical line and a horizontal line. I could call it set a set of axes, X-Y axis. And the vertical axis I called "flavor." And the horizontal axis, I called "time." And, so everyone, when they would walk into a seminar, would get a clear transparency. I give them a pen to write on this transparency. And I'd say to them, "Here's what I want you to imagine. The horizontal axis is time. The vertical axis is flavor." And I would hold up a can of soda and I'd say, "Imagine. Imagine, inside this can, imagine before the lid is put on, soda is added to this can," any kind of soda. Right? "Imagine soda's in the can. Imagine in the can is a probe, a flavor meter. And the flavor meter is connected to the pen in your hand." And what that... Wirelessly, Andrew. So, there's this probe that goes into the soda, into the can. It is, let's say, with Bluetooth technology connected to the pen in your hand, such that you have the ability with this magic pen to trace out what the flavor of the soda in the can is at any point in time. 0:29:31.0 BB: And so I would put on the vertical axis, right, the Y axis, I would put a little tick mark, maybe three quarters of the way up the vertical axis. And so everyone started at that tick mark. And I would say, "Okay, get your pen ready, get it on the tick mark. This flavor meter is inside the can. It's transmitting to your hand and the pen the flavor of Pepsi. If I was to seal this can, put the lid on it, and I say, 'Now the device is activated.' As soon as I put the lid on the can, the pen is activated and your hand starts to trace out what is the flavor of the soda doing over time." And I would say, "If you think the flavor gets better, then you have a curve going up. If you think the flavor of the soda's getting worse, then it goes down. If you think it stays the same, it just goes across." 0:30:37.1 BB: And I would just say, "What I want each of you to do, as soon as that can is sealed, I want you to imagine what the flavor of Pepsi, Coke, whatever it is, I want you to... " The question is, "What do you think the flavor of soda is doing in a sealed can over time?" And I would say, "Don't ask any questions. Just do that." Now, most of the people just take that and they just draw something. They might draw something flat going across. [chuckle] Now and then somebody would say, [chuckle] "Is the can in a refrigerator?" [chuckle] And my response is, "Don't complicate this." [laughter] 0:31:26.1 BB: So, I just throw that out. Most people just take that and just trace something out. And for the one who says, "Is it refrigerated? What's the timescale? Is the horizontal axis years or minutes?" I'd say, "Don't complicate it." [chuckle] 0:31:46.8 AS: "And don't ask questions." 0:31:48.9 BB: "And don't ask... " But you can bring me over and I'll ask you a question. You can ask your questions, I would just say, "Don't complicate it." So, what do we do? Everyone gets a few minutes, they draw it. I take all those transparencies that you can see through, and I put them on top of one another. And I can now hold them up to the room and people can see what I'm holding up. They can see all the different curves. 0:32:17.0 AS: Right. 0:32:18.0 BB: 'Cause they all start at the same point. And then I would say to the audience, "What do they all have in common?" Well, they all start at the same point. "What else do they have in common? What do they all have in common?" And people are like, "I don't know." Some of them are flat. They go across, the flavor doesn't change. Most of them think it goes down at some rate. 0:32:43.4 AS: Yep. 0:32:45.0 BB: Either concave down or convex down. Now and then, somebody will say it goes up and up and up; might go up and then down. But most people think it goes down over time. That's the leading answer. The second leading answer is it's constant. Up and down, rarely. So, I've done that. I've had people do that. I used to have a stack of 500 of transparencies. I used to save them and just go through them. I've done it, let's say in round numbers, 1,500 to 2,000 people. So, all the curves start at that tick mark in the 99.9999% of them either go down or go across. What's cool is, all those curves are smooth. Meaning, very smoothly up, very smoothly across, very smoothly down. Mathematically, that's called a "continuous function." And what I explained to them is, if I draw a vertical line halfway across the horizontal axis, and I look at every one of those curves, because the curves are smooth, if I draw a vertical line and how each curve, your profile and all the others go across that line, immediately to the left and immediately to the right, it's the same value because the curve is smooth. 0:34:28.3 BB: But I don't ask them to draw a smooth curve. I just say, "What do you think the flavor does over time?" They always, with three exceptions, draw a smooth curve. And so when I ask them what do they have in common, you get, "They start at the same point." Nope, that's not it. I don't know if anyone's ever articulated, "They're all continuous functions." Very rarely. So, then I explained, "They're all continuous functions. But I didn't ask you to draw a continuous function." Well, when I point out to them that three times, three times, Andrew, out of nearly 2,000, somebody drew a curve that goes starting at the tick mark, zero time, and it goes straight across halfway across the page at the same level, and then drops down to zero instantly, it's what's known mathematically as a "step function." 0:35:26.9 BB: So, it goes across, goes across, and then in zero time drops down to zero and then continues. So, three out of nearly 2,000 people drew a curve that wasn't smooth. Again, mathematically known as a step function. And each time I went up to that person and I said, and I comment on it, and each of them said, there's a point at which it goes bad. And each of them had a job in a quality organization. [chuckle] And so why is this important? Because in industry, there's this thing known as an "expiration date." What is an expiration date? It's the date past which you cannot use the chemical, the thing. And what's the assumption? The assumption is, a second before midnight on that date, Andrew, you could use that chemical, that acid, that glue, whatever it is in our product; a second before midnight, before the expiration date, you can use that. But a second after midnight, we put this tape and we call it "defective." And so I've worked with companies that are in the chemical business, and they literally have this tape. At the expiration date, we don't use it. A second before midnight, we do. And so what you have is a sense that it goes from good to bad, you know how fast, Andrew? 0:37:15.0 AS: Tick of a clock. 0:37:17.0 BB: Faster than that, Andrew. Zero time. 0:37:21.0 AS: Yeah. 0:37:22.0 BB: Zero time. And so what I ask people is, "Can you think of any phenomenon that happens in zero time?" And people call that's... "Well, the driver was killed instantly." No, it wasn't zero time. "Well, someone is shot." It's not zero time. And so what's cool is, when I ask people to describe a phenomenon, describe any physical phenomenon that happens in zero time, that we go from one location to another, from one state to another in zero time, I've not been stumped on that. Although actually, [chuckle] there are some situations where that happens. Well, the reason that's important for our audience is, that's a demonstration that expiration-date thinking is an organizational construct. It's not a physical construct. Milk goes bad fast. [chuckle] I'll admit, the expiration date on the half gallon of milk, it goes bad fast. 0:38:27.2 BB: But a second before midnight and a second after midnight, it's still the same. So, expiration-date thinking is what acceptability is about; that everything is good, equally good, but once we go across that expiration date, Andrew, then the flavor changes suddenly. And so what I used to kid people is, imagine if that really happened, right? Then we'd have this contest. I'd say, "Andrew, I had a can of Pepsi recently. And have you ever done this, Andrew? You get the can of Pepsi that has the expiration date on it. And if you listen to it at midnight, on the expiration date, you listen closely, you can hear it go from good to bad, Andrew." [chuckle] Would that be awesome? [chuckle] So, I was sharing some of this recently with our good friend, Christina, at The Deming Institute office. 0:39:31.0 AS: Yep. 0:39:32.7 BB: And it happened to be her birthday. And, so I sent her a note and I said, "Happy birthday." And I said, "So, did you change age immediately on the second you were born?" 'Cause she said, 'cause I think she said something like, "My mom reached out to me and she reminded me exactly what time I was born." And I said, "Oh," I said, "so did you feel the change in age as you crossed that?" And she said, she said, "Hi, Bill. Of course, I felt instantly different on my birthday. My mom even told me what time, so I'd know exactly when to feel different." [chuckle] Now, so here's a question for you, Andrew. Can you think of a situation where something changes from one value to another in zero time? In zero time. Again, we don't go from living to dying in zero time. The change of Pepsi doesn't go from one value to another in zero time. The quality of any product is not changing, you go from one side to the other. But can you think of anything that actually happens in zero time: Across that line, it goes from one value to another? 0:41:05.0 AS: Nope, I can't. 0:41:08.8 BB: Oh, come on, Andrew. You ready? 0:41:16.2 AS: Go for it. 0:41:20.0 BB: Did you ever hear of the German novelist, Thomas Mann, M-A-N-N? 0:41:24.0 AS: No. 0:41:25.7 BB: All right. I wrote this down as a closing thought; it may not be the closing thought. We'll just throw it in right now. So, this in an article [chuckle] I wrote for the Lean Management Journal. 0:41:38.0 AS: By the way, it's gotta be the closing thought because we're running out of time. So, perfect. 0:41:43.7 BB: Fantastic! Well, then here's my closing thought, Andrew. You want my closing thought? 0:41:47.1 AS: Do it. 0:41:48.1 BB: All right. So, from an article I wrote for the Lean Management Journal, so here's the quote. "I have witnessed industrial chemicals in full use right up to the expiration date, and then banned from use and tagged for immediate disposal with a passing of the expiration date only seconds before the chemicals were freely used. While they may rapidly sour, it is unlikely that they expire with a big bang, all in keeping with a sentiment of German novelist Thomas Mann's observation about New Year's Eve," Andrew. What he said was, "Time has no divisions to market's passage. There's never a thunderstorm or a blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when the century begins, it is only we mere mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols." So, at midnight on December 31st, a fraction of a second before midnight, we're in 2024 and we go to 2025 in zero time, Andrew. So, legally things change as you go across a line. You go from the United States to Mexico across a line of zero thickness. So, legally things across a line change instantly. 0:43:17.0 AS: Well. 0:43:18.0 BB: A coupon, Andrew, expires at midnight. [laughter] 0:43:22.7 AS: Yep. All right. Well, 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 if you wanna keep in touch with Bill, as he mentioned at the beginning, just reach out to him on LinkedIn. 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."