In Their Own Words

Education is often touted as data- or evidence-driven. But in this discussion, John Dues contends that educational data is often fiction, given how easy it is to distort, both via the inputs and outputs and through manipulation. 0:00:02.6 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of the educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. The topic for today is Data is Meaningless Without Context. John, take it away.   0:00:28.3 John Dues: Yeah, thanks for having me back, Andrew. I'm thinking a lot about educational data, and I think about how it's often presented, and I think so often, what we're actually doing with our educational data is what I call writing fiction, which is taking a lot of liberties with the data that comes into our system, whether it's state testing data or some other type of data that gets reported out to the public, and we often sort of manipulate that data or distort that data in a way that paints our organization or our school system or our state in a positive light, and I think we do that sometimes at the detriment of actually working to improve those organizations or those systems because we spend so much time trying to paint this positive picture instead of just putting the data out there.   0:01:26.3 AS: And it's interesting you talked... One of the interesting things about what you're saying is that it could be accurate and good data, but it's just the context or the structure of how it's presented makes it meaningless.   0:01:39.9 JD: Yeah, we try so hard to sort of paint it in this positive light to make it look like we're doing a good job. Everybody wants to do a good job, but I think we often do that at the detriment of our systems.   0:01:54.7 AS: One of the things that made me think about it, in the financial world, we have a code of ethics, and that is basically that... Particularly for CFA charter holders, financial analysts, that you have to present a complete picture of your performance. So if you have 10 customers that you're managing their money and one of them, you really bombed out and you decide you're gonna do the average of the nine that you did well on and then go out to your clients and say, "This is my performance," that's a very... You have an obligation to accurately represent your performance. And when I think about it in all the charts and graphs that people are making in education all around, I would say that most people probably are just, I would call it CYA, cover your ass type of charts [laughter] of, "How do we make this look good?"   0:02:43.9 JD: Yeah, I think... I read somewhere that there's sort of three ways you can respond to your data. You can actually work to improve the system, which would be a positive, and then the other two ways are two forms of a negative, one is you could distort the system itself, or you could actually distort the data. And a lot of times, there's not sort of a nefarious motivation underneath that distortion, but there's sort of, again, this desire to paint your organization or your system in this positive light. So sometimes they're straight up unethical behavior or cheating, but most of the time, that's not what I'm seeing and that's actually not what I'm talking about here today. It's more of this sort of taking liberties, writing fiction. "Okay, we declined from two years ago, but it's up from last year." Those types of sort of distortions of the data that I think are fairly common in education sector, probably all sectors too, so.   0:03:49.9 JD: I think... Maybe I'll share my screen for the folks that have video and I'll talk through it for the listeners that don't have video, but one of the things I often think of and focus on is state testing data, because so many people are looking at that data all the way from State Departments of Education, the school system, the individual schools, the individual teachers and classrooms with their students, and then of course, families get these state testing reports as well.   0:04:23.8 JD: And a handful of years ago, I was looking at one of these reports from the Ohio Department of Education and sort of picture this fancy, glossy, colorful PDF. It's got this big headline on it, it says, "Ohio students continue to show improved achievement in academic content areas." Then it's got a table with all the state tests, all the different grade levels, and three columns for three different years of data. And then in the last column, there's these up green arrows for where there's been improvement from year over year and then these red down arrows for where there's been a decline, and I was thinking to myself, "Well, in some of these areas, one, some of the percentage changes are so small that just on that... In that realm, they're sort of meaningless, like fifth grade science goes from 68.3% in one year and it goes up to 68.5% in another year. That's essentially a rounding error when you're talking about 100,000 or so students that are taking the test. I think calling that improvement is a stretch at best.   0:05:39.0 JD: And then I was focusing on third grade reading specifically because that's such a critical area. In Ohio, there's actually a third grade reading guarantee, so if you don't pass the test, there's the potential there that you could get held back in third grade, so there's a lot of focus on that data. So I was reading on in that state education department document. It said, "Well, third grade did see this decrease this year, but when you look back two years, it actually had... Third graders actually had an increase of proficiency." So again, you actually have a decline from this previous school year to the more recent school year in this document, and they're still making this claim because if you go back two years versus this most recent year, you do see improvement, and so you start to think to yourself, "Well, what is improvement? Do we have a definition of improvement? And if so, what has to be present?"   0:06:43.4 JD: And a few years ago, I came across this definition in sort of a seminal work in our area called The Improvement Guide, and the author sort of outlined a definition for improvement, and it sort of has these three components, and this made a lot of sense to me. If you're gonna claim improvement, you have to, one, alter how work or activity is done or the makeup of a tool. So you had to change something. Basically change something about the work you're doing. That change had to produce these visible positive differences in results relative to historical norms, and then the third thing is it had to have a lasting impact. And so when I go back and I think about that state testing data or really any type of data, you start to ask this question, Is this really improvement, or again, is this writing fiction? Is this not really improvement, but we're twisting the numbers to sort of fit our narrative?   0:07:45.0 JD: So when we think about that state testing data, do we have knowledge for how worker activity has been altered systematically. And if I can't point to that, then how am I gonna take the so-called improvement and bring it to other places in the state that may not have had those same improvements? Do I have these visible positive differences in results going back and comparing to historical norms, not just last year or even two years ago, but five or six or eight or 10 years worth of data. And then have I been able to sustain that improvement? Has there been a lasting impact? Have I been able to hold the gains? And if I haven't been able to do those three things, point to what we change compared to historical norms and then sustain that improvement, I would argue that we haven't really brought about improvement. We can't claim that we've improved our system.   0:08:46.9 AS: It's interesting. Before we go on the numbers that you were showing, roughly, the average there is something like 60%. What's the 40? That 60% is what? And that means 40% is not that.   0:09:07.7 JD: Yeah, I'll go back. So when you're thinking about state test scores, most states have some type of threshold, like we have this goal that X percent of our students are gonna be considered proficient on any given test. So in Ohio, that threshold is 80%. So the state says, in order to meet the benchmark, any given school needs to have 80% of its students, let's say, on third grade reading test have to meet this proficiency standard. And so what we saw in this particular data is that in the 2015-16 school year, 54.9% of the kids met that proficiency threshold. The following year in '16-17, 63.8% of the kids met that threshold, and then in the most recent year in this particular testing document in '17-18 61.2% of the kids were proficient. So just about 40...   0:10:04.8 AS: So even if it was a sizable increase, it wasn't just statistically insignificant, it's still roughly 40% of the students aren't proficient. No matter even what the government says about what's the minimum standard, it would be hard to really argue too much about improvement when you're so low. [chuckle]   0:10:32.8 JD: That's right, yeah. And that's what you often see in these types of these documents. So 40%, a significant minority of students are not proficient on the third grade reading test, and 60% are, and there's these incremental increases and decreases depending on the year that you're looking at.   0:10:54.6 AS: It's like the Titanic heading for an iceberg and you say, "I've turned the ship one degree, but we're still gonna hit the iceberg."   0:11:01.9 JD: But we're still gonna hit, yep, yep.   [chuckle]   0:11:04.3 AS: Alright, keep going.   0:11:06.0 JD: Yeah. So I think what's really important thinking about data in context, when you start actually stepping back and saying, "Okay, let's look at third grade reading over the course of 16 or 17 years versus three years," this very different story emerges. Part of that story is that context, so what has changed about Ohio's third grade state reading system over the course of those years? So if you go back all the way back to the 2003-2004 school year, you see Ohio is giving a particular test called the Ohio Achievement test, and you see as that's administered each year for six or seven or eight years, the results are sort of bouncing around this average, somewhere in the neighborhood of 77-78%. Then you have a change in about the 2011-12 school year. Now, we're given this test called the Ohio Achievement Assessment, but it's pretty similar, just the name has changed, the test itself is still the same, and you see basically these very similar results. And then all of a sudden, you sort of fast forward to the 14-15 school year. Anybody that's an educator from back in that time period, they'll sort of recognize that now we're getting these new common core standards, these more rigorous college and career-aligned standards, we start giving these new tests.   0:12:38.7 JD: So Ohio switches to the PARCC Test for the '14-15 school year for one year, and even then, the test itself changed pretty significantly in terms of format, but you still see pretty similar results that you've seen for the past 11, 12, 13 years. Then all of a sudden, that next school year, that 2015-16 school year, so that's the first year from that testing document, you see the results drop off a cliff and you start thinking, "Well, what happened to third graders?"   0:13:11.7 AS: Right. From, let's just say about 77 down to the next data point is 55.   0:13:18.6 JD: Yeah, just under 55% now. So you have this just about a 20, 22% drop in one school year. Now, the test did change again. Now it's called The Ohio State Test, it was called the PARCC Test, but the test itself, the format itself isn't probably what brought about that precipitous drop. Instead, what's happened is the legislature in Ohio has changed what it means to be proficient on the test. So basically, each sort of proficiency level has a cut score, and the cut score has increased for an individual child to be considered efficient. So the kids are no different in '14-15 than the new crop of third graders are in '15-16, but what has changed is what you need to do to be called proficient, and so because of that change, you see this huge drop in test scores along with this new test, and then over the course of the next three years, you sort of see an increased in test scores, and then a decrease in test scores, and then an increase in test scores, and then a decrease in test scores. And the Department of Education is claiming that there's improvement happening, but really what's happened is a whole new system has been created. You really change that third grade reading state testing system into this brand new system, whereas the average had been bouncing around 77% or so. Now you sort of have this new average bouncing around that 60% mark.   0:14:56.9 JD: And again, the kids are no different from those previous years, it's just the test and what you need to do to be considered proficient has changed. And the problem is, is that if you don't look at data like this, if you don't sort of...   0:15:11.5 AS: As a run chart or as a continuum of genuine information that's coming out of the system as measured by some measurement style.   0:15:21.0 JD: Yeah, and annotate it with point to the year that the new test goes into effect, point to the year that the definition of proficiency has changed, point to the year that schools had to switch from paper and pencil test to computer-based test because just a year or two or three after, those sort of memories become really fuzzy, that context becomes very fuzzy and you start to forget, "What year did we switch to computer test? What year did the standard switch? What year did the proficiency cut score switch?" And so if you don't have that sort of running record, that gets completely disconnected, the data gets disconnected from the context, and then you're likely not to make sound decisions because of that lack of context.   0:16:09.2 AS: And maybe I'll raise a few points here about the chart that we're looking at, and this chart is fascinating to me. The first thing that I think about, as a financial analyst in the stock market, basically, if anything is wrong in my chart and in my data and then I put my money down on that, it's gonna get taken from me in the stock market. And I have to really be very rigorous in how I'm looking at data.   0:16:39.1 AS: And when I look at this, I just think this is just so full of so many different ways that could go wrong in the way that things are measured, the way people are incentivized, those types of things. And the other thing that you realize is what you're showing here is that it's a description of the system. It's trying to describe things that are going on, and you're trying to describe certain points, which you can't do in charts that are... Bar charts and things like that. A line chart or a continuous point chart or a run chart really illustrates that. But also I think... I just realized that so much of almost every bit of charting is meaningless or just... Or is even giving you a wrong signal. There's so many things that I think about that and I'm just curious, 'cause you also said something before to me about how maybe people just don't pay much attention to it and then they just accept it for what it says and they don't go and look at the data, think about it and go into more detail. Those are some of the things that come out of my head as I'm looking at this, but what else do you want us to take away from this?   0:17:58.0 JD: Yeah, I think one thing, without the context and the annotations on a line chart or a run chart, data shown over time, you do forget. That's one thing. That's just human nature. You're gonna forget. I'm not gonna remember what happened 10 years ago in my testing system. I'm probably not gonna remember what happened five or even three years ago. The second thing I would say is that the vast majority of data that gets presented is in a table or a spreadsheet, and that data is usually what I would call limited comparison, so this year's data compared to last year's data or this month data compared to the same month last year. And so we're usually trying to draw conclusions with just two or maybe three data points, and that gets even worse when we sort of layer sort of a color-coded stoplight type system where we label certain data red and certain data yellow and certain data green and then we look for the red and the green data, even though the differences between those two, the scales that we use to to assign those colors is often arbitrary and meaningless.   0:19:11.0 AS: One last thing I would add to it, and I think you're gonna show us a good, an example of a good use of data, but also you have to ask the question, Are the people who are preparing this data incentivized to produce a particular outcome, and when you understand the incentives involved, it helps you also understand where it could go wrong.   0:19:33.2 JD: Well, I think that's exactly right. I think what happens oftentimes is the state testing data is a part of an a accountability system, and the point of an accountability system is to sort the good from the bad and to issue sanctions and rewards, and we sort of point to that data and say, Well, your scores are low, you need to improve. And so we sort of conflate this idea of accountability data or accountability goals and improvement goals, and those are really two different things, and so you brought up sort of this idea of CYA or cover your ass type stuff, and when we point towards accountability data, that's what people are gonna do because they are being held accountable for this data, they're gonna cover their ass. If we're truly using data for improvement, there's a completely different mindset. For one, the data tends to be local and well-known to the people that are using it, and if there's not sort of sanctions tied to it, then there is this ability to be more honest and candid about that data because we're using it for improvement purposes rather than using it for accountability purposes.   0:20:51.9 AS: Okay, that's great, great description. Alright, keep going. What do you wanna show us next?   0:20:56.8 JD: Yeah, I think this last chart. And so for the listeners, I've taken the five most recent years of third grade reading test data and put it in an actual process behavior chart, or some people call them control charts, and the advantage here is like the run chart, we're seeing data over time, we're seeing the variation, we're seeing the data move up and down over time, but with the process behavior chart, we're adding these upper and lower natural process limits or some people call them control limits and define, sort of, predict the future of what's gonna happen in this particular system, as long as things move along at the current steady state, and so remember, I was gonna say, just remember in that third grade reading data, and they sort of said, "Well, we improved, and then we did decline this most recent year, but if you look back two years, it's actually an improvement," but actually what you see is, if you play that out over five years, you see the data increase and then decrease, and then increase and then decrease, and that's a very sort of common occurrence with this type of data where there's this natural variation, it becomes obvious when you plot the dots over time, and you really see what is happening with this data is it's just sort of moving about an average, about a 60% proficiency rate.   0:22:35.1 JD: Some years it's a little lower than that, some years it's a little above that, but it's all within the limits of the system, so that tells us that all of that's present is common cause variation, just sort of this every day sort of expected up and down in the data, there's sort of nothing special that's happened to use Deming's terminology, there are no special causes present that would be... So there's these signals we can look for based on patterns in the data, but that's not to say that we're satisfied with this third grade Reading System. So to your point earlier, that average proficiency rate for the state, so we look at all of the third graders in the state of Ohio, and they took this test over the course of five years, about 60% of the kids were proficient in any given year. So that means 40%, two of the five kids that are taking this test are not proficient. So we have a stable but unsatisfactory system, but because there's no special causes, no special events to study or point to what we need to do is improve that third grade reading system across the state.   0:23:47.0 JD: And so that's a completely different mindset than pointing to a single data point saying, "Oh, we've gone down, what are you gonna do, or issue sanctions to this school or to this teacher", that's not the way to improve. What we need to do is improve the system of third grade reading instruction across the state, so a completely different mindset.   0:24:08.1 AS: That's a great explanation. The idea that I get from you is the idea of taking all of the emotion out of it, and let's say how do we use this to improve? And what you're describing here is, and what you've done is you've taken the most recent period of time, now, some people would say, "Oh well, you should look at it over a longer period of time", but what you've described is that the system has changed.   0:24:30.1 JD: That's right.   0:24:31.9 AS: There's been some significant change, and so it may not make sense to look at that prior period, so now you brought it down to the most recent period, what's operating under the same type of system, and what you find is that it's pretty much random variation, which I'm even surprised for 2020, 2021, given COVID and all that, I would have thought that instead of coming down to 53 or so, that that would have come down to 40 or something, just because now maybe it does in the next year, I don't know, but... Okay, that's a great illustration. Now, you had an example to try to show the good use of a chart.   0:25:11.2 JD: Yeah, I have a personal example. I can sort of talk through, this one is a little busier, but I think what I'm trying to illustrate is one, I think when I think of continual improvement, I think that is the same thing as what I would call intermediate statistical methods, that's equivalent to continual improvement. Those two things are the same thing. So what I mean is that in order to bring about improvement, it's very, very powerful to use one of these charts, whether it's a run chart or a process behavior chart, but the point is display your data over time and see how it's performing, and then what you can do then is run these systematic tests, this is sort of that theory of knowledge component of Deming System of Profound Knowledge, specifically the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle. So you sort of run this structured test to try something within your system, in this case, if you can see the video of this, I'm displaying my weight over the course of three or four months, and you kind of see that over time, it's slowly shifting down, but there's a lot of ups and downs in this data as I'm trying various things, so I have PDSA 1 marked with a vertical dotted line, I gave PDSA two marked with a vertical dotted line and PDSA three marked with a vertical dotted line.   0:26:46.5 AS: And for the listeners that don't know what PDSA is, it's Plan-Do-Study-Act. It's that cycle.   0:26:53.0 JD: Right, Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle, these scientific tests where I'm trying something, maybe it's related to my eating habits, or maybe it's related to my workout habits, or maybe it's sort of a combination of those two, but I'm writing those things down in this Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle. And then the second thing, I'll describe for those that are only listening, I'm also annotating when special events have happened that then lead to signals in my data. So for one, I have in December, towards the end of December, it's probably not hard to guess I have these holiday cheat days marked because you see this jump in weight that goes above the sort of upper limit, which says to me, "Oh, wait, something so different has happened in my system, and that I really need to attend to that", right. Now, if I had waited until February 21st, the day we're recording this, to look back and see this highest data point in my system over the last three or four months, I probably would not remember what caused that. Because I annotate it as it happened, I have this picture, I have this narrative tied to my data that allows me to think back and reflect and figure out what happened to make the weight in this case jump off the page. Over time, what I'm trying to do is both shrink the limits, so lessen the variation around the average, as well as again, in this case, it's weight, so a decrease is good, so I'm also trying to bring that average data down over time and so the idea would be the same no matter what type of data, whether it was those state test scores, whether it's attendance rates, whatever it is, homework completion, whatever it is that you're trying to improve, this sort of same combination of understanding variation, combining it with these Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles. This is the method, This is continual improvement, I think in a nutshell.   0:29:00.2 AS: Fantastic. Alright, I think that illustrates it well, and maybe if you stop sharing that screen and then I'm gonna show you something, John, and for the viewers, they'll be able to see it, but for the listeners, I'll explain it. I'm gonna walk over to my other part of my room here for a second, I'm gonna grab the chart that I fill out each day.   0:29:26.9 JD: Oh my.   0:29:27.8 AS: And this is my chart, and for the listeners out there, I'm holding up a big chart paper, and it's related to my top three goals. I ripped it by... But my goals are related to sales, to health as in yoga and doing exercise every day and my sleep patterns. And I'm tracking how many hours I work on each one, or how many hours I slept, how much time I did on yoga, and I'm not even putting in any kind of limits into it. What I like to do is to track data and just observe, don't try to think about it, don't try to work towards it, just chart it and start observing, and one of my goals is to sleep more. I wanna sleep seven hours, and on average I sleep about six, and I don't have a solution for it, but I know that charting it and observing it and starting to think about it just raises the awareness and gets me thinking, "Okay, I'm far away from my goal, what do I need to do"? So charting is just fantastic, and I think that what you've described is a great way of understanding it.   0:30:34.0 JD: Yeah, I think when you read Deming stuff or listen to him talk, there's often these sort of short phrases that he'll refer to or say, and over time you start to understand what he was saying in just a few words, these powerful statements. When I think of looking at data in a chart over time, Deming said, "Knowledge has temporal spread", four words, knowledge has temporal spread, so what does that mean? So it's not until... Sorry, it's not until you understand or look at data unfolding over time and how it's moving about, how it's varying from point to point, it's not until you see that over the course of 20 or 25 or 30 points that you really start to know how your system is performing, and I think that's really what I was trying to show with the state testing data, with this personal example in a process behavior chart. I think that's the power of the Deming methods when you put all this together.   0:31:43.7 AS: Fantastic. Well, let me try to wrap up a couple of things, we start off with the title of our discussion, which is Data is Meaningless without Context, and you were asking the question like, Are we really improving or are we just writing fiction here? And I was thinking about a lot of cases, people are of massaging the meaning of it. And then another thing that you raised was the idea of what is improvement, do we have a definition? What does it mean? And then you reference the improvement guide book, which talked about the three things that are critical for being real improvement, first that it alters something, second that it produces visible results, and third, that it has a lasting impact. I wrote after that, I was taking notes and I thought, Is it repeatable? Was kind of what they're saying, but I think from a business perspective, and maybe from an education perspective, the better word is it replicable, can it be implemented at other places and brought the same type of improvement? And then finally, I'll wrap up my summary of what you said with your discussion about accountability data versus improvement data, and how improvement data, it's important not necessarily to tie it to incentives, that data is really for how do we understand the system and how do we think about improving that system through a PDSA and other things. Is there anything else you would add to that summary?   0:33:11.5 JD: Yeah, I think that this idea of what's the purpose of the data? Is it for accountability? Or is it for improvement? I think that it sort of gets at one of Deming's 14 points, which is drive out fear, he said, "Where there is fear, there will be wrong figures", and I think that really ties to that idea of Well, what's the purpose of this data? If there's fear and people are thinking that they're gonna be sanctioned in one way or another, then you're not gonna get correct figures, that's just sort of human nature, and I think that's why all this stuff sort of fits together, and you need the sort of full picture about the four components of the system of profound knowledge, the 14 points like drive out fear. And it's bringing all those things together at the leadership level to create the conditions for improvement to actually occur in an organization.   0:34:04.7 AS: Yeah, and I'd imagine as your organization really improves, you'll kinda laugh at all the charts and graphs you used to produce or you used to talk about, and now you're really making use and making data meaningful. So John, I think that's a great discussion. And on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for it. And for listeners, remember to go to Deming.org to continue your journey. 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".

The podcast discusses the concept of quality and how different experts have varying perspectives on it. It explores the importance of going beyond meeting requirements and adopting a gas gauge mindset in organizations. The podcast also delves into the hero mentality and the need for prevention, as well as the importance of focusing on the customer in business choices. It emphasizes the misconception that quality only means meeting requirements and highlights the need for organizations to shift their focus towards improvement opportunities.

In this episode, Andrew and David discuss how managers can help people to see themselves as components in a system, working with those before and after them in the process of educating children - for the benefit of all. This podcast series is inspired by chapter 6 in The New Economics, Andrew and David apply Dr. Deming's 14 points for "the role of a manager of people after transformation" to the world of education. (Note: this is not about Deming's 14 Points for Management.) TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I am continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is cooperation with proceeding stages in education. And ladies and gentlemen, we are going through a checklist or a list that Dr. Deming put in his The New Economics book on page 86 of the third edition, or page 125 of the second edition. And the title of this list is Role of a Manager of People.   0:00:45.4 AS: This is the new role of a manager of people after transformation. The first point on the list, which we previously talked about was, number one, a manager understands and conveys to his people the meaning of a system. He explains the aims of the system, he teaches his people to understand how the work of the group supports these aims. And today we will be talking about number two. He helps his people to see themselves as components in a system to work in cooperation with preceeding stages and with following stages toward optimization of the efforts of all stages toward achievement of the aim. David, take it away.   0:01:26.7 David Langford: There you go. If you understand that, then the podcast is over. [laughter] So yeah, I think the profound nature of Deming's work was his ability to take these simple concepts and just state them. And for me, working in education, people, they start to get the philosophy and they start to understand Deming, et cetera, and they always wanna know where to start or what to do. Well, here you go. These are all steps of what to do, where to start. So the last podcast we were talking about the development of an aim. And so you... The first question you have to decide is, do I have an aim of the system? And is that being communicated? And we talked a lot about that going through that. So the second point actually feeds on that, and remember this whole section is the role of the manager of people, see, what are you doing with the people in the system?   0:02:25.7 DL: And so this whole point is about understanding a systems' perspective in any organization. But in education, it's really clear. And we've said several times that the product of education is the learning itself. It's not students. And I think people really get screwed up on that, when they start to think about that, "We're producing students." No, you're not. Yes, students are going through the process, but they're gaining a level of learning that's gonna, that's getting them closer and closer to the aim of the system, right? And so those things are measurable, and then you can begin to understand those. So what he is talking about here in step number two is... Often when I work with educators, no matter what level, university, K through 12, whatever it might be, I'll throw out the idea that, let's say you're a 10th grade math teacher.   0:03:32.8 DL: What's the one thing you could be doing this year that would significantly increase the performance of your students next year? And a lot of times people say, you know, better technology and they'll go through this whole list of all these kinds of things they could do. But that's what Deming is talking about here. You could keep right on doing the same curriculum, the same thing you've done for 15 years, but if you start working with preceding stages, where did these students learn math before they got to you? Right? And so if you're a 10th grade math teacher, one of the best things you could do is start working with the ninth grade math teachers. Like going over, what are they doing, how are they teaching it? What's happening? How are they going through stuff?   0:04:22.4 DL: And you're actually preventing your own problems. Later in The New Economics, Deming talks about that prevention is the key to quality. And that's what he is talking about here. If I am going upstream in the process, so to speak, and preventing my own problems, right? I could actually just keep doing the exact same thing I've always done. I'm gonna get better results because I'm now preventing problems that I used to have to work with all the time. And some people say, well, you know, our students are coming from outside of our organization and I don't have the chance to do that. Well, you sort of think of a class that you're teaching as a system in and of itself.   0:05:06.7 DL: So what I could do is the first week of school is not gonna be, you know, really getting to the subject at all, right? I'm gonna become my own preceding stage [laughter], I'm gonna make sure that all these students have the same base knowledge that I need them to have in order for the rest of my teaching, the rest of my curriculum to actually work really well. That might take a week, it might take two weeks, but it'd be worth it to you [chuckle] to go back and do that rather than just keep on doing the same thing and expecting a different result and then putting pressure on people to make, sort of make them think it's their fault that they're not achieving.   0:05:48.9 AS: One question I have just because I'm not familiar with education so much, more business, if I think about business and I think about the preceding stages. You've got a manager in that department and he's got his own motivations, or she got their motivations, they've got their KPIs, and they've got all these things that are preventing cooperation. But it must not be true in education, David, when people are so dedicated to helping young people, it must be that the ninth grade math teacher is absolutely ready and willing to cooperate with the 10th grade math teacher. Wouldn't that be?   0:06:25.4 DL: Oh, when I started working with schools I often would have teachers come up to me at breaks and stuff and say, you know, I taught with this guy across the hall for 11 years, and I can't tell you anything that he does over there, or she does over there. The silo mechanisms of, you know, close my door, do my thing and don't communicate was just rampant. And it's still largely that way. And especially in a lot of universities, just people working in silos, you know, the college of business has no idea what the College of Education is doing and vice versa and so on and so forth. And you begin to break down those barriers. Deming talks about that later too. But you break down those barriers between departments, you start to see everybody wins. Student are better trained. The whole system seems to work together.   0:07:24.6 DL: I remember when we first started having visitors come to our high school where we'd been working with Dr. Deming and trying to implement these things for several years, after about three or four days, I'd have people that were visiting would say, you know, everybody here seems to know what everybody else is doing. And I'd say, isn't that the way it is in your school? And they said, no, I have no idea what other people are doing. And so I had to really start to think about, well, what had we done? Well, one of the things we'd done was we kept reiterating this point, right? Work with preceding stages, understand what's going on.   0:08:08.3 DL: We actually formally set up time where you could actually get together as a department or get together and look at a whole curriculum throughout the entire system. Now, some districts have over the last 30, 40 years, you know, they'll have a K through 12 curriculum alignment, right? And that's getting towards this point so that we're all working in preceding stages. So I don't have fourth graders, fourth grade teachers spending time doing stuff that has already been done in second or third grade, right? And the kids are just going, you know, they might be really dutiful kids and they just don't say anything, but they're just bored out of their minds because they already did this, right?   0:08:54.7 AS: When you were speaking, it made me realize the importance of step number one, about identifying the aim and getting everybody on board with that aim and communicating that and helping people see their role in that aim. Otherwise, there's like no incentive for people, oh, why are we having another meeting to talk about this? You know, what's the point? Well, when the aim is clear, all of a sudden the intrinsic motivation just explodes.   0:09:19.0 DL: Yeah. I mean, my own children is a good example. Remember one of my kids came to me and said, you know, dad, this is the third year we've done an insect collection in science. So were they really good at collecting insects by the end of the three years? Well, yeah, but they could have had a much higher knowledge about insects or something else that was going on rather than just this mundane project of going out and collecting insects and categorizing them.   0:09:51.4 AS: One of the questions I have, there's two points to this that I was thinking about. One is kind of the academic freedom of a teacher to be able to, you know, particularly in a university, they want to feel like I can do and say what I want. The second one is that they're so damn busy trying to prepare their lectures that it's hard. David, cooperation is difficult to bring a system to optimization. You realize like one of the reasons why people don't do it is it's just hard. It's way more coordination. Tell me your thoughts on that.   0:10:24.2 DL: You just described why Deming calls it Profound Knowledge, so the places that it is happening, right? Or making it, making sure that it's important. Setting aside time, talking about specifically how we can do that. You get a new professor in, you got economics 101 and Economics 102, right? So are they aligned? And the benefit in the end is for the students, right? Because they're not going through the very same thing that they just went through in economics 101, right? And the students will recognize things like, wow, these people are actually really working together. They really understand what's going on.   0:11:11.2 DL: And if I'm teaching economics 201 and I can constantly refer back to now when you took 101, I know that you went through this exercise and you went through this and you had this kind of experience, and this is how we're gonna build on that in 201 and... Right? So that's what Deming is talking is about here, is that if I carve out that time to work with preceding stages, the benefit is for me and my students and my classes and, in that, everybody wins, right? Because as a professor, I can go on to a higher level knowledge with the assurance that these students had this level of knowledge and mastered it before they got to my class. And that's the whole idea basically about why we've set up classes like 101, 201, 301, right? That's supposed to be the philosophy, really understanding that.   0:12:12.6 DL: And I'd say most departments or school districts, they loosely sort of do that. But from experience, if you consciously put in the effort to align curriculums, communicate with the preceding stages you get a huge benefit out of that that's just unbelievable. And Deming goes on to say, you know, and the following stages, right? So let's say we're using this example of Economics 101 and 201 or whatever you might be, right? And then some of those students are gonna go on to 301. Well, I would wanna know that my students were much more prepared going to the next stage. So how am I gonna do that? Well, I'm gonna start talking to the teacher in the next stage and saying, hey, how are my students doing? And were they prepared to come into your class or not prepared or, you know, what's happening?   0:13:18.7 AS: I was thinking about how one of the... I had a discussion with someone this past week, and it's a guy my age, you know, young and healthy and happy. [laughter] And getting close to 60. And he said, young people these days, you know, blah, blah, blah and all that. And I said to him, I said, you know, I think basically the young people these days realize they've kind of been let down by us and we've done all kinds of, you know, whether it's safety or whether it's education or whether it's, you know, whatever. There's so many things where I think that they just don't trust it. And then we go to online learning and all of a sudden all of these adults are giving us these super boring presentations. And it's like, we are not delivering to young people.   0:14:10.4 AS: And then, oh, add on 32 trillion in debt. Oh, by the way, you gotta pay that also. And the streets are, you know, cities are on fire and all of that. And then you just think, yeah. Part of what's happening is that when we incentivize teachers to optimize their classroom, that's what they're gonna do. They're gonna do their KPIs and they're gonna focus on that, and they're not gonna be thinking about how are these kids going through this process and getting to a result that we want? And yeah, you just made me think about that, but I don't know. What are your thoughts on that?   0:14:45.6 DL: Well, Deming talks about in the last sentence, that work with preceding and following stages for the optimization and efforts of all stages towards achievement of the aim. So what are you trying to accomplish with the achievement of this aim? I'm working with a college of business now, and through the pandemic, almost all the classes went online and now students are graduating and going to work and stuff. And what are employers saying? These people aren't trained as well.   0:15:20.4 AS: The communication skills.   0:15:22.5 DL: Yeah. The university is struggling because they know this online thing doesn't work as well, but they're struggling with, how do we change this? Because the following stages are telling you the learning that these people are coming out with is not the same as it used to be. We used to be able to depend on the quality of the students coming through the system. And now we can't depend on them. Well, that's dangerous because that could lead employers to say, okay, we're no longer going to hire people from this university. We're gonna go to some other university and look for places. So I always think about, you know, Deming is talking about the system, but how big of a system are we talking about, right? Could be talking about a whole university as a system, and the more I can get the entire university to talk to each other, work together, align curriculums, right? Well, who wins in the end? Well, students going out into the world, right?   0:16:24.8 DL: And they get to employers and employers start to realize, wow, I never knew that I needed somebody with this kind of knowledge. And so, who's first on your list to hire next year? I want more of these. Very simple example, the first couple of years that I was leading classes and teaching my high school students about this, well, in Alaska, the popular summer job is what they call the slime line. So working in fish plants, salmon processing plants on the line where fish comes through and you have to process them and gut them and take their heads off and do all this kind of stuff. So we didn't tell students about anything, but after about two years, I got some phone calls from these canneries, managers in these canneries and they said, hey, do you have any more of these students? And so I called them back up to talk to them about what was happening.   0:17:31.5 DL: And they said, well, we found out that every place there were students from your high school that were on the slime line, productivity improved. And sure enough, they started talking to these kids and they said, well, we took this to heart. And one kid said, all I did was I just said to the guy next to me, when you pass that fish to me, it'd be really helpful if you just turned it like this. And then all I have to do is do this. And then he said to the guy next to him, he said, what do you want me to do? What would be most helpful for you? And that guy says, well, that girl says, oh, well turn it like this or do this, and then this would happen.   0:18:14.2 DL: Just that, that's a very simple example. But employers loved it, [laughter] because productivity started to go up. One student said, yeah, it actually got to be more fun because I put a chart up behind me and how many fish we were processing per hour. And it sort of became a game to see if we could increase not only the quality of what we were doing, but the number of fish that we were processing per hour. Well, you might say, well, you know, yeah. What's the big deal about that? Well, guess what? Those canneries wanna hire those people again next summer. [laughter], you got a guaranteed job if you wanna come back.   0:18:50.6 AS: It's interesting because when you actually ask that question, or when you ask someone, hey, would you mind when when you send it over to me, could you put it in this way? People would be like, I never even knew that you needed it that way.   0:19:06.2 DL: Yeah. Or you'd find out that people have been ticked off at you for some cases years because you just keep on doing the same darn thing, but nothing ever changes because that person never doesn't ever say anything to you, and you never asked. You have to be proactive in all this too, going to the following stages and saying, hey, what could I be doing differently that would be significantly helpful for you?   0:19:36.6 AS: Yeah. Also, you reminded me of a story, when I was head of research in a research team here in Thailand, I had about five analysts. And our objective is to write high quality, big reports. I hired the best analysts. They know exactly what they need to do. They love doing it. And what I did is I put up on the wall a bar, a stacked bar chart showing each person's output each week. And what I did is I just put it up on the wall. I didn't explain it. I didn't, you know, I just looked at it occasionally, I went back to my office and and I didn't, I mean, I never really explained or said anything. And then one time one of the younger analysts came to me and she said, I think I've just figured you out. And I was like, what do you mean? And she said, I had lunch with a counterpart, like at another, a competitor, and she covers the same sector.   0:20:30.2 AS: And she asked me, how many reports did you do last month? And I said, you know, meaning my employee said, I did, I don't know, 10. And she's like, oh my God, how did you do 10? And she said, how many did you do? And she said, well, I did three, and there's similar style reports. And she's like, well, what's Andrew's target for you? And that's when she looked at me and she said, I realize you never set a target. You just put that information up on the wall. And it got all of us looking at it and thinking about it. And then I realized that I was producing 10 reports compared to my competitor was producing three. And that just made me think of that when you were talking about putting that up on the wall.   0:21:15.4 DL: The genius of Deming, Dr. Deming is when he went into manufacturing plants. And here you have a manufacturing plant where this person is stuck doing the same thing all day long. Right? Well, from early studies, from Hawthorne studies back in the 1920s and thirties, what did we try to do? Well, we gotta motivate these people, right? So, let's turn up the heat. Let's turn down the heat, let's play music for them. Let's do this, let's try. And what they found out is everything that they did actually, productivity worked, but they couldn't figure out what was it for a while.   0:21:52.5 DL: But, in the end, what was really happening is employees were perceiving that that management cared. And so they were trying to do stuff to make things better, but the genius of Deming was he just said, put people to work improving their own process and taught them how to do that, how to do a PDSA, and how to look at improving their own process. And it actually work started to be enjoyable. And that's what we're trying to do. And yes, you gotta do stuff. I've had teachers, especially math teachers tell me, well, not everything can be fun. Sometimes math is just hard. Well, maybe in your class, but I'm sure there are places that people make...   0:22:45.1 AS: How about if you just smile?   0:22:45.5 DL: Yeah. Make math really fun. And kids look forward to coming every day and being a part of it and learning the next level of what they're doing. And change the situation, you get a different result, rather than what we've always been taught to do is we leave the situation alone, but then we manage the behavior, it produces either good or bad. You know, we reward the good and try to get rid of the bad, which is a classic example of what Deming said don't do.   0:23:15.3 AS: So, let me wrap it up by asking a question and then I'll review kind of what we talked about. Based upon this discussion, if I was taking over at let's say a high school or something like that, and I thought about this specific lesson of what we're talking about today, I made the aim clear, everybody knows, and now I'm thinking about it. Would it make sense to say, alright, what I really want is I want each teacher to know the one proceeding stage and the one... What would you call that? The stage after.   0:23:51.1 DL: Following stages.   0:23:52.4 AS: The following stage and the previous stage. And therefore, what I just wanna do is start a discussion where they have to have kind of like a regular meeting or some way to get them together to talk and just focus on one step behind and in front. And if you did that, it's like the whole place would be on fire with conversation. Would that be a good place to start with this?   0:24:16.3 DL: Yeah, absolutely. You start with the largest system over which you have influence. And it depends on what your job is. If you're just hired as a teacher in a system and you realize these people don't talk to each other, they don't work together, well, you don't have to go get permission from anybody to talk to preceding stages. You just go into that person's room at the end of the day and say, hey, you got a few minutes I wanted to chat with you about something, you know.   0:24:44.0 AS: Make a new friend.   0:24:46.3 DL: Or yeah. And or following stages, you go to them, I guarantee you, you go to them and you say, what could I be doing that would significantly help you next year?   0:24:54.7 AS: Well, sit down, let's talk.   0:24:57.7 DL: Oh my gosh. Yeah. They would love you to death, right? And so it's a great way that you actually start to gain power of changing things in the system because all of a sudden then your department actually seems to get along and function well together and students are doing well. And then I guarantee you somebody from another department is gonna say, what are you guys doing over there? What's happening? Well, why do you ask? Because students in my class are saying, why can't we do what's happening over there? See? And so that's how you actually start to expand influence. And pretty soon you're operating on a bigger and bigger system, even if that wasn't your original role, but Deming said the source of power is knowledge. So you become very powerful because you know how to improve processes and systems.   0:25:51.5 AS: It reminds me of a... When I was writing Transform Your Business with Dr. Deming's 14 points. I had a friend of mine help me with the editing, and he would come over sometimes and he was... He never heard anything about Deming and he didn't know much about even business that much. He just seen all kinds of negative things happen [laughter] in the business world. But what he said is, he said, you know, I've been reading what you're writing and understanding this, and I think Dr. Deming is a humanist. He really cares about the human potential. And I was just like, that's it, it's not about this, charts and the graphs, and it's not, it's about how do we tap into the human potential.   0:26:34.0 DL: Yeah. Well, the average workers in corporations loved Deming mostly because he just berated management, totally, that you were the problem. You know, let these people do their job and get out of their way and you'll be fine. Instead of you trying to manipulate and incentivize and manage and punish and all the things that you think your job is.   0:27:00.2 AS: Let your people free. So let's wrap up. We've been talking about the list that Dr. Deming gave us in the third edition on page 86, the second edition on page 125, and it's called Role of a Manager of People. And Dr. Deming said, this is the new role of a manager of people after transformation. The first part we talked about, he talked about understanding a system and making sure that people understand the aim, but now this discussion has been about number two, he helps his people to see themselves as components in the system to work in cooperation with proceeding stages and with following stages towards optimization of the efforts of all stages toward achievement of the aim. And what we talked about is that the product of education is the process of learning and the idea of working with teachers in maybe prior grades, prior processes. And maybe a lot of what we've really talked about is communication and alignment. Is there anything else you'd add to that?   0:28:07.9 DL: No, that pretty much sums it up. I would, I will say that if you're listening to these podcasts and you're in education and you're trying to figure out where to start or what to do, we're explaining to you what to do. And so each one of these podcasts, if you just went back and did one thing we're talking about, and by the time we finish going through all these, you'll have a massive transformation of your classroom, your system, whatever it might be going on within that. But here's a great place to start right here.   0:28:36.5 AS: Wonderful. David, on behalf of everybody at the Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for the discussion. For listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. Listeners can learn more about David at langfordlearning.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.

Andrew talks to Justin Marcharia, Round Table Training Africa's Managing Director, about his collaboration with The Deming Institute. His goal is to help new and small businesses in East Africa use the Deming philosophy to grow in sustainable ways. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: Hello. My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm here with featured guest Justin Macharia. Justin, are you ready to share your Deming journey?   0:00:17.2 Justin Macharia: Oh, yeah, I'm ready.   0:00:19.5 AS: I'm excited to learn... I mean there are so many things that I would like to ask you about your Deming journey and where your Deming journey is and all of that. But let me introduce you to the audience. Justin Macharia is the managing director of Round Table Training Africa Limited. Justin has been working with the Deming Institute over the past couple of years to enable DemingNEXT access into a number of East African countries through his organization. It's gonna be beneficial I think for all of our listeners to learn about this partnership and the impact that we think the Deming Institute can have in East Africa. And also, it's a great opportunity for you, Justin, to share why you think that Deming is important part of development in your part of the world and why you see the opportunity as kind of first time opportunity to enable businesses to learn and apply the Deming method. So maybe you can just talk a little bit about what you're doing first, and then we'll get into your Deming journey.   0:01:29.9 JM: Thank you Andrew. Yeah, so Deming Institute in Africa, basically East Africa, that's Nairobi, Kenya started off in the year 2020. And we've walked the journey with Kevin and Tim. And basically what we've... We've found that there was an opportunity to instill best practices in manufacturing, hospitality, and any other organizations that are moving from either raw production or the value chain addition. So what inspired us into getting into and partnering with Deming was basically the... We have a lots of trainings, consultants in our area, but however we found that they were lacking in terms of the depth and the philosophy and the models and tools. So what happens is, basically is we reached out to the Deming Institute and we did a presentation and asked if we could partner with them. And of course we had to give a little bit of background about ourselves.   0:02:34.9 JM: And what is basically happening in East Africa right now is... 'cause East Africa is be in in agribusiness, but agribusiness is on only probably small scale to large scale and mostly of the cash crops for export. But more and more now people are getting into value addition and processing. And that comes with a lot of systems, processes and management skills that are required for that. Apart from that, there's a lot of manufacturing going on and it's probably sometimes ad hoc and learning on the job which can... It can be very expensive and a little mistakes and system and processes or a lack of there of. So that has actually created the need and the appreciation and like probably Andrew had mentioned that, just a little bit earlier, is that everybody knows Deming, anybody who is in a management course, 'cause they always talk about Deming at some point during the introduction as the gurus of quality management. So the take up has been gradual and slow, but we're getting somewhere with it right now.   0:03:42.3 AS: And maybe for the listeners out there I'll explain about, what the Deming Institute is doing with DemingNEXT and trying to get, obviously all the video material that's available about Dr. Deming's teaching, but also providing all the resources necessary for training. So for those that are listening that think, God, I really wanna get more training into my company related to Deming. Well, the Deming Institute has made so much of that available through DemingNEXT. So I think that's an important message to everybody out there, is that it is a resource not only for your own personal development, but how you can bring some of that training into your company or any company that you're interacting with. Maybe you just tell us briefly about what your expectation is or what you expect to be doing with that material and with your own material and how are you doing that training. And maybe just tell us a little bit about that.   0:04:39.9 JM: Well, thanks Andrew. So what the DemingNEXT actually offers a lot of resources like you mentioned. There are PDFs, there are case studies. Because as much as we train a local organization, it's always good to give them a case study of basically where it has worked before, the successes because the industry and the verticals, probably is it the service industry, is it the telecommunication, we find 'cause somebody believes in the credibility of a process by basically seeing it has worked before with somebody else. And this what... The challenges they went through. So it shortens the learning curve because you don't have to go through the mistakes they did. They share with their case studies. And this improves like what Deming talks a lot about is the continuous improvement.   0:05:30.0 JM: Continuous improvement. So you progressively improve as you go on, get the feedback from the customers, feedback from the system itself. And this has really helped in terms of... The resources that are online on DemingNEXT has really helped in fortifying what the facilitators are actually telling and teaching the participants.   0:05:52.7 AS: Fantastic. So for all the listeners and viewers out there, make sure that you go to DemingNEXT to understand what resources are available and if you are in East Africa what's the website, your website that they could go to to learn more about what you guys are doing?   0:06:09.8 JM: Well, yeah, thanks. Our website is www.roundtabletraining.co.ke. There you'll find a wide array of programs and also the links to the Deming resources as well.   0:06:24.5 AS: Fantastic. So tell us about... You know, now it is time for some of the fun stuff where we talk about your Deming journey. And as you and I talked about before we turned on the mic, the recorder, you're early in your Deming journey. You've started recently and you're learning. And I know there's plenty of listeners that are early in their Deming journey. And I know there's some old timers also that are listening that are like, okay, so what's it like? So maybe you can tell us about the story about how you first came to understand and learn about Dr. Deming's teachings. And what was it that hooked you that made you think, I want to bring this training to other people?   0:07:02.6 JM: Thank you. Yeah, so my journey basically, my career has been spanning over 20 years, actually about 23 years. But actually within my career I have interacted with so many training institutions from ICT to management and leadership. However, there's always something lacking in them. There's always something I was feeling we're not giving them the depth and the case studies and proven models, things that have worked. So that's basically around 2020. Basically around the COVID time.   0:08:25.7 JM: I went actually searching and interacted with... I saw Deming. I saw... There is a Deming Institute in the US and we decided, okay, let's approach them because we know about Deming and Dr. Deming's philosophies. It's been trained and taught. But what really caught me and I remember and many people remember is the PDSA cycle, the PDSA that one... Everybody knows about that cycle. So when we reached out and they actually said, all right, we can give it a try. And hence we started off the journey in East Africa like that. So the PDSA and appreciation of systems and all that, those are the ones that basically caught us on teaching.   0:08:27.9 AS: And maybe we can talk a little bit about what's happening in Africa for I know a lot of listeners they may not really know all the stuff that's going on in your part of the world in East Africa. And I know Kenya is going through a lot of growth these days. Maybe you can just tell us a little bit about what's going on there in particular in relation to business and development. You mentioned the idea of being a resources exporter and trying to add more value to that. Yeah, maybe walk us through a little bit about what's happening in the economy of Kenya.   0:09:01.1 JM: So Kenya is very strategically positioned in Africa. It's basically the gateway of the East and Central Africa region which covers the DRC, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia, Southern Sudan. So the economy is basically very robust especially in the... Recently the financial market, the mobile banking. Maybe some of you have heard of the mobile banking actually was actually birthed in Kenya with something called M-Pesa. So the service industry apart from the Agro and the traditional products that have been traditionally produced.   0:09:44.7 JM: There is hospitality, tourism. I know you've heard of the big five safaris. So tourism is really huge in East Africa. Not only Kenya, but Uganda, Tanzania as well. So with that is the traditional ways of commerce and the GDP relies heavily on that. However, the service and the technology has been growing recently. And thanks to the internet there is are a lot of resources as well. People are either going to school or they are self-teaching themselves. So a lot to offer from this point of view in terms of tourism, Agro-business, service, telecommunication and all that. So it's a great place to be.   0:10:32.8 AS: I'm curious, I've lived in Asia almost the majority of my life, let's say the last 30 years. And as I look back at America, I see a reason, one of the reasons why Deming has a hard time is that people are so individually focused. Like individual, they want individual compensation. They want individual rewards. They do not wanna be part of a system so much and all of that. And you can see that compares to let's say Japan where they really value being part of that system and society. They do not want the individual rewards the way that it's done. And you see every country is different. And I'm just curious, what are the motivations that drive, what are the things that drive people there that the way people think about business and doing business so that we can then understand what part of Deming is most appealing?   0:11:28.0 JM: Oh yeah, so yeah, actually it's a... I can say probably East Africa and Kenya has a lot to borrow from Japan 'cause people do get a lot of value by coming together and they value that. So there are these things we call Chamas, is like coming together maybe 10 people pulling resources and getting to a certain business investment. So it's really big all the way from the ground up we call it table banking. It could be from, let's say ladies coming together. So it's a big thing. So but what normally lacks in moving it... The transition to growth is what is normally the difficult part. They could get to point... From point A to point B but managing the growth, the change by instilling processes, systems that will enable them to grow and scale up now becomes a challenge.   0:12:28.0 JM: Hence that's why DemingNEXT and also the membership. The membership which we are also... Introduced to the market which we have individual membership for DemingNEXT and the corporate membership is what we actually been proposing to even these what I call the Chamas basically pull in and learn from the rest of the world how processes and they're very simple processes actually, DemingNEXT, actually has very simple way of breaking things up to people. So that kind of people come together in terms of business and investment but the growth trajectory is what that lacks and that's why DemingNEXT has come with this philosophies to push guys and help people move to the next level.   0:13:11.3 AS: Yeah moving to the next level is interesting 'cause I know when I moved to Thailand Justin I went out I taught a Just-In-Time inventory management class in 1992 and at that time the Japanese had really come to Thailand and producing cars. So I took my students out to a Toyota factory and I remember that the guy, the Japanese guy said I have to apologize that most of our managers are Japanese. In the beginning we just have a lot of training that we've been doing and over years you know it will grow where we'll have more of the Thai people in management. And then what you see now is when you visit Toyota and you realize wow that they've really done a huge amount of training. And many of the Thai staff that started at a low level have moved up into management and you know carrying on.   0:14:02.8 AS: So I can imagine that part of what you're talking about is that transition to just developing the core skills and then slowly developing into management and how to manage that business or your own businesses better and better. I guess that's kind of the transition that you're talking about. Would that be right?   0:14:21.2 JM: Oh yes yes. Because what is normally said managers normally they're not appointed. They grow into the position. So as they grow into the position there are some skills that we may lack in terms of managing the teams. And I like what Dr. Deming's philosophy of the psychology the soft skills part of it and relying on the process and not the big stick approach. So yeah it really helps especially new managers to fit into the role and get the rest to follow and emulate the good practices.   0:14:56.6 AS: Tell us something about let's say the characteristics of people there. And I'll give you an example. In Thailand, obviously in America if you raise your voice and you shout and you yell and say I want this and that, it... People, nobody likes that but they don't mind that, it's not a big deal. But in Thailand you never raise your voice and you just would never do that. Or else it would be people just wouldn't buy into that. And maybe tell us one characteristic that you see in Kenya that is part of the characteristic of the workforce or the way people feel socially like something that maybe an American as an example may come and think that they're bringing their culture but in fact they're not very sensitive to let's say some feeling or way that people do their... They live their lives and they think about things. Maybe you can give us some example.   0:15:51.8 JM: Alright yeah. So basically like sometimes it is very common with Kenya and of course it's spread a little bit across the region as well is appreciation the soft skills. It's continuous, celebrating small successes as well. So the populace, the employees would like to feel appreciated in the workplace. Otherwise if it's like over reliant on the processing and the system like okay it was part of your job you don't need a pat on your back. That kind a thing sometimes like oh a little pat would've helped. So it gives a smile to people. So it is the same with thank you did a good job. Even though it was part of the job. It's something that the populace really appreciate. So sometimes when you get maybe some probably managers from a different place and it is none of that it creates the silos and people pull out a little bit and it becomes an eight to five job. They're not enjoying it. It's like okay I'm just doing my job. But that's what I can actually think about right now.   0:17:00.5 AS: Yeah it's a great point and it obviously people around the world want intrinsic, they wanna feel that they're contributing to the value. And I think different societies have different need for that. I would say for Thais, they don't have as strong of a need for that but everybody likes to know when I'm contributing to the success of the organization and the role that I'm playing. So that's definitely and I'm guessing that people you know a lot of times when you look at Thailand's got an agricultural history, America has an agricultural history but it didn't last for very long because it turned into kind of in commercial and industrial agriculture. But when you look at countries that just have such a foundation in agriculture you have to work together or else in harvesting in planting villages work together in Thailand. Is that part of the history and part of the culture there? Or what's it like as far as teamwork versus individual work?   0:18:00.8 AS: Teamwork has actually been part of the culture. Because let's talk about the "Good old days" is when you're going to the farm you would go as a team. If you are ploughing, you'll plough as a team, harvesting you'll harvest as a team. So that's the same thing that has come down the generations. And even at work even though you are in the service sector you'll decide okay let's get together and let's do this. Let's get together and do this investment or let's do this team building. So it has carried on the generations and the only time maybe individualism comes and it's silos and like corporate politics, some groupings form within the organization. But that is... A good manager will know how to break the silos and to get people communicating again. So when Deming as well it gives... Has multiple courses that you can basically custom-make to break the silos which is a very popular one especially engagement, emotional intelligence and all that.   0:19:05.1 AS: Yeah. And in fact, what you learn is that the natural state of things is people don't want silos, they don't wanna be put up against each other like that.   0:19:14.8 JM: True, True.   0:19:16.5 AS: And so by breaking that... I'll tell you a funny story, when I was first working in an investment bank in Thailand, it was 1994 maybe at that time, and the Human Resource sent around a memo or a survey and they asked us to just tick what we thought and... The question was, "Would you like to have a company uniform that you would wear to work?"   0:19:41.8 AS: Now, as an American, I was like, "What? Why would I want that?" I'm an individual, I got my clothes, I don't need that. And so I just thought, nobody would answer yes to that, and then the next day then Human Resources said, "Well, it was unanimous, everybody wants a uniform, and we're gonna be working on getting those uniforms for everyone." And I was like, "Okay." I really didn't understand that about Thai people versus American people, and it just is a funny story about the idea that people wanna belong, and it's interesting that it's... In America, it really is like that individual and independent, which has it's value for sure. But that feeling of belonging, I think, is what I really like about the Deming content and what... The message of Dr. Deming. And it makes me think about... One of the questions that I like to ask is why Deming? Why now? And I'm curious, what would you answer to that, 'cause some people would say, "Oh, it's the old stuff and it's been around for a while, and there's new philosophies and new books and all that." but why would you say Justin, Why Deming? Why now?   0:20:56.1 JM: Yeah, Why Deming? Why now? Is really simple because we are in a transformational transitionary period for East Africans, and a lot of things have probably been done a little bit ad hoc, you're learning on the job, which is, we all know is costly, it's costly to learn on the job. So Deming philosophy brings forth a lot of tools and methodologies that you can basically move to the next level using international best practices. So basically what we know is a lot of tools of Deming also have been adopted in different ways, there are probably some software, have actually been designed and the background is basically the Deming philosophy, you know the PBC cycle, is it variations, understanding variations, all those things that help you to move to the next level. The PDA cycle again that again is known with the Toyota, everybody knows about Toyota and Japan after the World War II and how Deming, Dr. Deming really contributed to that. So it is done, proved, luckily also Deming Institute has also modernized the PDA cycle, there is the modern one now that it is now... It is in cognizant to the current challenges that we have today. So Deming... Right now it's in the right place, everybody should go back to the roots, those who deviated from the roots are finding themselves in unknown territory, they need to come back to the roots and we move forward.   0:22:31.3 AS: Fantastic, and I know for the listeners out there, whether you're in East Africa or wherever you are in the world, one of the things that I always see nowadays, it's like everybody thinks that KPIs and particular individual key performance indicators are the way to manage people, and I think one of the things that I really enjoy about the Deming material and the Deming method is that it's miles beyond just tracking someone's behavior, it goes much deeper than that, and it's about the psychology and bringing out the intrinsic motivation of people and getting them involved and when you do that, ultimately you unleash a power of the people that's fantastic. Maybe as we wrap up, one of the things I'd love for you to do is just share maybe one of your experiences in your training over the years that you... A story or something that you have felt like is a proud moment for you.   0:23:31.2 JM: Alright. There could be a couple I'm trying to see which one could it be but I can... Let's see. There's a time we actually had some group in-house trainings 'cause we offer open trainings, so that we get people from different organizations, but this particular one where we got into an in-house training, and so the facilitator basically got... Was sent to the organization and it was basically, the soft skills, so it was a three-day program, and what came out of it was not... Basically was not even the training, that was... Had been positioned to be trained the moment, the psychology of pains, and the breaking of the silos that came up, it became like a team building and that team building now changed the whole perspective of the training and in fact we had to change the course trajectory mid-way so that now, people can now... Because what we realized was that there were just silos, all over the place, and the training itself would not have earned any... Gotten any dividends, if it went on like that. So it was changed and they actually called us some time later to come and give them their training that had been planned, so that is why I remember that we had to change the course in between because the silos were just crazy inside there, so that one was memorable.   0:25:00.5 AS: It's interesting that you referred to silos many times in this discussion, it's clearly an issue that Deming can help solve, which is...   0:25:08.1 JM: Yes.   0:25:09.8 AS: It's happening all around the world, but it's great to think that you've got a solution, and for the listeners out there, again, if you're in East Africa, reach out and figure out how you can get some of this great stuff and this great training to your business. Well, Justin, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for coming on the show. And let me ask you, do you have any parting words for the audience?   0:25:36.9 JM: Alright. I'd like to... If you're in East Africa, you can go to our website at roundtabletraining.co.ke enroll into any program or contact the number that you'll find there, and we can come and have a visit and talk to you more about what and how Deming can transform your organization.   0:26:00.1 AS:  Fantastic, and that concludes another great story from the worldwide Deming community and how... We learn how Deming is making a footprint in East Africa. Remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. 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.

Most people come into education familiar with classroom management and curriculum, but the concept of Profound Knowledge changes the way you view the entire field and your part in it. In the second episode of the Deming in Schools Case Study, Andrew and John talk about applying the System of Profound Knowledge to education.  0:00:02.0 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. The topic for today is applying Deming's system of profound knowledge in education. John, take it away. 0:00:26.8 John Dues: Andrew, it's great to be back. And excited to talk about this. One of the things I was talking about after... Thinking about after our last conversation was a moment I had where I realized as I worked with some senior leaders here is we have these two buckets of knowledge, one bucket I would call subject matter knowledge, and we talked about this a little bit last time, by subject matter, I don't mean knowing, reading or social studies or writing, but I mean the things that you need to know in your field, so for us it's classroom management, how to deliver a lesson, how to design a curriculum, those types of things, and that's always sort of been a part of my work and gained proficiency in that bucket over time, but what I realized in studying Deming is there's this whole other bucket or type of knowledge, what Deming called Profound Knowledge and that was missing across most of my career, and it was a revelation to understand that, "Hey, we need both of these things together to have any chance at improving our schools." 0:01:35.4 AS: It's interesting because the whole focus in most of education is to become a subject matter expert, and that's what's rewarded, that's what we're doing. And this whole way of, how do we see the world? Is such a unique thing. Maybe you can just go through a little bit on the system of profound knowledge as when you first came to it, and what does it mean to you?   0:02:04.4 JD: Yeah, I've been studying it for a handful of years now. Increasingly, it became this sort of foundational philosophy, and it really changed how I view the world, honestly, it wasn't only sort of in my work, although that's sort of where I started thinking most about Deming's ideas. It changed also sort of how I thought about my personal life, family, my own kids in school and their experience in school, so I had a profound impact on just about everything I was doing in my life, that's pretty foundational to discover a philosophy like this... 0:02:51.3 AS: Yeah, that's... I remember when I first understand... For me, it was variation and randomness that really kind of hit me because I was also working in the stock market, and I could see that there was a lot of randomness in the movement of stock prices, and then it was like all of a sudden, what I learned from the randomness aspect and the variation aspect was just like, it's like there's carpeting that we're walking on that nobody even realizes it's underlying everything, and it is this randomness, and we are trained to reject randomness because we're rugged individualists who are setting our own path and it's up to us to make a difference. And that type of thinking basically has to reject the role of randomness, so I know what you're saying about... That started to change the way I viewed the world. Continue on. 0:03:54.2 JD: I think building off what you're saying, there's a variation component to that, and that was sort of an entry point for me too as I read Donald Wheeler's Understanding Variation, which is sort of completely changed how I looked at numbers and data in our work here in schools, but I also think of what I'm hearing in what you're saying is complex systems, and so I think there was sort of an appreciation for systems thinking prior to Deming, but not in the same way, but I think for a lot of folks it's if we do A to B then C is gonna happen. And that's just not how things sort of unfolded in a complex system, be it schools or a company or a society or whatever you may be looking at, if you do A, then that may impact B, C, D, E, F, G in a certain way, and the outcome is gonna be impacted by all of those things, all of those changes, and I think that's sort of... You can start to see that when you start to understand variation, and then that other component, or first component of Deming's Profound Knowledge is Appreciation for a System. 0:05:07.4 JD: And I think that's sort of what he's getting at, that it's really hard to find causal links between things and if we're gonna search for those, then we need to appreciate our organizations as a system, how all of the departments or all of the grade levels in the case of a school are working together or not, and how something you do in one part of that system can impact positively or negatively, other parts of the system, even if what you did in the part of the system was a positive for that part of the system, they can actually destroy the system, and so all of these things were revelations or at least confirmations of things that maybe were in the back of my mind, before I had this understanding in writing from studying Deming's philosophy. 0:06:00.7 AS: And for the listeners or the viewers who aren't familiar with the System of Profound Knowledge, maybe you can just review the four points of it or the four parts, a little bit more. 0:06:12.2 JD: Yeah, System of Profound Knowledge. So four components, Appreciation for a System, Knowledge about Variation, Theory of knowledge and Psychology, and he called them a System of Profound Knowledge because the four components work together, that's the system part. And Profound Knowledge, what I learned over time, is that, what he meant by that is just sort of the deep understanding that comes through viewing your organization through the lens of Profound Knowledge, so when you bring those four things together, you get a different view of your organization, than without Profound Knowledge. And without Profound Knowledge, you are often misled, you often don't know when to react or not to react to something that's going on in your organization or system, with Profound Knowledge you now have a management philosophy by which to interpret that data that comes streaming at you, no matter what industry you're in, and gives you a way to map out how to react or again, not to react to that data. 0:07:18.8 AS: It makes me think there's a saying in Thai language about a frog under a coconut, and when you lift up the coconut, the frog kind of wants the coconut back on because that's their world. And I think about when you really come across the System of Profound Knowledge and you understand it, it's like that coconut comes off and you realize, Oh my God, I am part of a much bigger system, and all of a sudden things just open up and what was your experience when you first kind of started really realizing how this all works together. 0:08:00.3 JD: Well, maybe unlike the frog, I didn't wanna unsee it or I didn't want to be recovered, however, there certainly was... Well one, it took time for me to sort of understand what exactly Dr. Deming was saying, and I'm still trying to understand that fully, but the hardest thing was probably talking to people, really smart people, about Profound Knowledge and maybe them not sort of seeing the importance of it or the same level of importance that I thought that they should see or where we'll talk about it, it would be well-received, but then people would turn around and sort of revert back to the old way of thinking. And for me, it was just realizing that this just takes repeated practice, because it is really a completely new way of thinking. 0:09:00.9 JD: It's a completely new way to look at data or your systems, it's a completely new way to think about how do you bring new ideas to your organization, how do you test those ideas, it's really getting away from simple things like setting a goal without a method, it's appreciating the psychology of introducing changes to your organization. I found people are generally very open to new things, what they're not open to is being sort of yanked about constantly when we try this thing and that thing, and education has the same sort of problem in this area that other sectors like healthcare do, where the frontline people, teachers in our case, nurses in the case of healthcare where they're often being pulled this way and that with new initiatives to the point they get this initiative fatigue will wear people out and burn people out and then they leave because each leader comes in with their own pet idea and it's not grounded in this sort of solid philosophical foundation. 0:10:13.3 AS: One of the things that's interesting about the system of profound knowledge is that it can be a bit overwhelming for someone who's first coming upon it because it's like, Oh my God, there's a much bigger aim, and one of the reasons why we don't think in a systems way and why we do think silos is because it's easier, and so for some people it can feel like, Oh God, this is just overwhelming, and I'm just curious what your perspectives are on that, either for yourself or the people that you're working with there, and how do we make sure that you don't get overwhelmed by it? 0:10:57.6 JD: Yeah, it's a challenge because I originally came to the Deming Institute website and the profound knowledge page and went away because it didn't make sense to me initially, and it was two years later when I came back, and not that it was sort of some divine revelation, but I slowly, over time, it started to sink in, something caught my attention that this was worthy of study. So one thing I read, Dr. Deming said, you don't need to be eminent in all four areas or even any one of the four areas, but it does require serious study, so you're not gonna understand it in a day or a week or a month. I would also say anybody that gets serious about studying this philosophy, I would highly recommend reaching out to somebody that is further along in their understanding, and that's sort of a turning point, I think I mentioned in the last episode. Reaching out to Kelly Allen, who turned me on to David Langford that accelerated my learning, 'cause I could ask specific questions, and David could give me specific applications of Deming's ideas in schools, and that certainly helped to clarify a lot of things for me. 0:12:08.3 JD: So that's something I would highly recommend, but I would read widely, watch the videos, you can go to a four-day or sorry, two and half day seminar that the Institute does, and then reaching out to someone that is further along is something I'd highly recommend. 0:12:27.1 AS: Yeah, great advice. And just this podcast already is a starting point for the listeners out there. 0:12:33.2 JD: Yep, absolutely. 0:12:34.8 AS: One of the things that I say to my students in my valuation master class, they come to my class because it's like, Andrew, you got 30 years of experience as a financial analyst, and you were voted number one and you... This and that, and I really wanna learn from you. And when I come into class, I announce a couple of the things... And one of the things is I say, You Are Always Wrong. And I call it YAAW. And I try to help the students understand it, in the world of finance, there is no precision, like in the world of physics or the law of gravity or something like that, that you're always going to be wrong and therefore don't freak out over that. Understand that it's a system. The second thing that I tell the students, and this one I think really gets them, they don't really figure it out until the end, and that is in my class and in the world of finance, what I teach is, if I'm successful as a teacher in this specific area that I'm teaching, if you feel less confident when you finish my course, I've succeeded. 0:13:48.7 AS: And I think that students freak out because of I'm here to be more confident Andrew, and what I'm exposing them to is that it's a constant... We're walking on quick sand. We're operating in a world where even in the world of finance, just observing the world of finance, observing market prices and stuff can influence actions that we're taking in the market... Can influence market prices. So the complexity level is so high. 0:14:27.1 JD: Yeah, yeah, one of the things that makes me think of is sort of a... I don't know if I'd call it paradox, but one of the early places that I went even prior to sort of coming across, Deming's work is the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and they have it as their mission to bring the science of improvement to the education sector. And they have an annual Improvement Summit. The first time I went, I realized that they had this footer on all of their materials and it said, "Probably wrong, definitely incomplete." And that was a really great entry way into the science of improvement because that's the mentality you need when you start any type of improvement work, improvement project in your organization, and I sort of stole that idea and stuck it on all our materials. 0:15:27.8 JD: And I think the reaction from a lot of people first is similar to how you're describing the reaction of your students is that, wait a second, aren't you supposed to be an expert, don't you know what you're talking about? And I said, "No, that's not what this is about." This is about humbling yourself, realizing the complexity of the organizations that we're working in, and that at the outset of any improvement project, that there are gonna be things that you discover along the way that were completely unknown at the start, and so if you don't take that mindset and you rush in and you're sure of yourself, then you are set up for failure from the beginning, in my opinion. 0:16:09.7 AS: So if we go back to the title of this episode, Applying Deming's System of Profound Knowledge in Education, part of it is it starts to open you up beyond subject matter, and also it starts to help you understand that there's just a much more, a bigger world out there of influences that are driving us, and I think one of the things that's interesting about that is it... Young managers in the world of business are seeming to latch on to KPIs and feeling like it is a simple solution, we just define everybody's KPI, we nail them with it, we repeat it to them, we have them write it out in their goals and we measure it, and if they don't achieve it. Boom. And what Deming is teaching is just the opposite, that when you understand the system of profound knowledge, you understand that optimizing the output of any organization is a much more complex reality than just putting a KPI and a number on it. 0:17:18.8 JD: Yeah, I think of a colleague of a contemporary of Dr. Deming, who is still doing great work, Dr. Donald Wheeler said something to the effect of goal setting, KPI setting, goal setting is often an act of desperation, meaning like you don't know what else to do, so you set a goal, you don't have a method, you don't have a theory for how to improve, so you set this goal and then say something to the effect of, "I don't care how you get it done. Just get it done." Right, and then all hell breaks loose. And what do you think he's talking about is, if you don't understand the capability of your system, if you don't understand whatever area you're talking about, whatever area that KPI is in, if you don't understand how that data is varying over time, if you don't understand if there are just common causes, there are special causes in that data, you have no idea how to react nor do you know what your system was capable of the first place. 0:18:26.1 JD: That's sort of one of the sessions I led with leadership team here, and everybody kind of looks and says, Well, aren't we supposed to set goals? and there's really nothing wrong with setting goals in and of themselves, but we often set them in ways that are completely detached from reality, both in the magnitude of improvement that we're expecting and is a lack of understanding of how that same data has performed over time. 0:18:52.5 AS: Yeah, and it reminds me of Dr. Deming's statement of 'by what method?' 0:18:56.2 JD: By what method, yeah. 0:18:58.9 AS: So for, in wrapping up our discussion, I wanna go back and review some of what we've just talked about, so we're talking about applying the system of profound knowledge in education, and what you've talked about is the idea of coming into education, most people are very familiar with subject matter knowledge about classroom management and curriculum management and all that, but what was missing when you started your journey was this concept of Profound Knowledge, and once you started to understand it, it changed the way that you viewed the world, and then we just briefly talked about the idea, I wrote down something which was "probably wrong, definitely incomplete", and I would say that there are plenty of places where they think "definitely right. Probably complete." [laughter] 0:19:47.3 AS: And then you just mentioned the idea of setting goals, and I think Deming is not against goals, it's that goal is just one measure, I would say, if you set goals for individuals that incentivize them individually, you've created a big problem of competition, but most importantly, I think what you're saying is the idea of just setting a goal like, We wanna increase test scores by X or in my business, I want revenue growth to be up by 20% next year, the question really becomes by what method is there anything else that you would add to wrap up our discussion? 0:20:28.2 JD: Yeah, I think goals or quotas, especially if you're optimizing one part of the system, very likely to destroy the system as a whole, or at least sub-optimize it make it worse. I think Deming said something to the fact of quotas can be a fortress against improvement. Right. I think he was exactly right, because people start to do all kinds of weird things when you start to set quotas or goals, especially again, if they're incentivized as an individual, whether that's an individual worker or an individual department, things start to sort of happen in the opposite of what you wanted to happen when you do things like set goals, without that appreciation for the capability of the system in the first place, or an understanding of the data or an idea for how to improve, because it's like, well, if our goal... If we're gonna set a goal to increase test scores, let's say by 10% next year, why don't we do it this year? If we knew how to do that, what were we waiting on, why do we think we can do it next year, if we couldn't do it this year... 0:21:33.8 AS: Great points. 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. 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.

Dr. Bill Bellows, a quality expert, talks about his journey from Taguchi to Deming, including solving big problems in space shuttles along the way. He shares his experience using Taguchi methods to solve tank issues and the importance of variable data in fractional factorial testing. He also discusses shifting thinking and the importance of questioning, as well as discovering Dr. Deming's teachings and teaching Deming with examples.

With this episode, Andrew and David P. Langford start a new series on the Role of the Manager in Education. Inspired by chapter 6 in The New Economics, Andrew and David apply Dr. Deming's 14 points for "the role of a manager of people after transformation" to the world of education. (Note: this is not about Deming's 14 Points for Management.) 0:00:02.6 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is the beginning of a series, The role of a manager in education. David, take it away.   0:00:29.9 David Langford: Hello, Andrew. So I always wanna say good morning or good evening, but you're in Thailand, and I'm in Montana, so there's a problem there.   0:00:39.8 AS: [laughter] They both work.   0:00:41.8 DL: So yeah. [chuckle] So glad to be back again.   0:00:43.4 AS: Great to be with you.   0:00:44.8 DL: So yes, I wanted to dive into this, because I actually had a number of comments that people have sent me, both email and Twitter and all those kinds of things, yeah, asking questions about it, et cetera. And even at seminars, I get questions about it. So we're working from Dr. Deming's book, The New Economics, in chapter six, and I have the third edition, so in my case, we're on page 86. And Deming... And the whole chapter is about the management of people. So Deming laid out about 14 different points about what managers should do, how should you operate, and what should you do, and et cetera. So I thought it'd be really good for us to kinda work our way through those and discuss what does that mean in education. Because, do we even have managers in education? So probably the first thing I wanna point out is he has a whole chapter on leadership, which is different, I think, than management. And so, I think this is getting more to on the day-to-day operations, what are we supposed to be doing or how do we operate?   0:02:03.5 DL: And he even makes the distinction, the role of the manager of people after the transformation. So that basically means, okay, you've read about Deming, you've... Or you read The New Economics, or you've watched videos, or you learned about it. And you kinda made that transformation that, "Hey, this is where I wanna go, and this is what I wanna do." Well, then comes, "Okay, well, what do I do Monday morning?" is the big... Always the big question I get. And if somebody can't help you figure out what to do Monday morning, then they really... I don't think they really understand themselves about what to do, and you should probably find another coach or another leader to [chuckle] help you sort of figure that out. So let's take the first point, and maybe you wanna read it off for our audience and...   0:03:00.2 AS: Yeah. So the first of these points is, "A manager understands and conveys to his people the meaning of a system. He explains the aim of the system. He teaches his people to understand how the work of the group supports these aims." Simple stuff.   0:03:26.6 DL: Well, it... On the surface, it does sound simple, but doing it is another matter. So I wanna take this right down to the classroom level and say that as a classroom teacher, you are a manager of people. And it doesn't really matter what age they are, if it's talking pre-school all the way to graduate school, you're a manager of people. So the first thing he says, "The manager understands and conveys to his people the meaning of a system." So people always wanna know, "Where do I start? What do I do?" Well, there's a pretty good place to start right there. What is a system? So a system has inputs coming into it, and then it has the system itself, which is made up of processes within that system, and the system then has outputs, right. So in education, I remember back when Deming first started to get well-known, and people from business especially would come into education circles and try to tell educators what to do or how they should be managing to achieve quality, et cetera. And one of the first things they would do is they would talk about students as products, like you would think about in a company.   0:05:00.5 DL: And I kinda went for a couple of years thinking through that, and then all of a sudden it dawned on me, and a lot of it had to do with reading this section here. Students are not products, right? And if you think of them like that, then you're gonna think of them like inanimate objects that you do things to basically. And if I just adjust the process here, then suddenly all the kids will just be better, they'll learn better, et cetera, et cetera. Or I just throw in a new curriculum, and everything is gonna be fine, or you're not actually involving them in the process at all. So when I started giving seminars and working with people, I started to explain that the product of an education system is the learning itself. So what are they learning and to what degree do they... Are they learning, and how are you managing the people in that system to optimize the learning? And if you think of it like that, then you start to think of students as basically workers like in a company, in an organization. They're there to actually help you produce a product and tell you when things are going well and when things are not going well and how to make adjustments and everything to get a different result, right. And I find that when people sort of make that understanding in a system, especially as a teacher, you start to think of kids totally different.   0:06:46.6 DL: I remember when I first started and encountered Deming, teachers used to talk about students in a very derogatory way, and, "Oh, that kid isn't even worth this," and, "That kid's not worth that and can't... " That they didn't actually think of them as part of the... Of a system. And so when I started... Part of the problem is the nomenclature that we use, we have system, we have teachers, we have students, and along with that comes certain definitions that have evolved over the last couple hundred years. So when I started actually teaching teachers to stop using the term students and start calling them colleagues. Well, at first there was sort of an uproar [chuckle] about that. I remember one teacher telling me, "I mean, that snotty-nosed kid that says duh all the time, I'm supposed to think of him as my colleague?" and "Well, yes, you are, [chuckle] because that's your job," right, is to sort of... And Deming's talking about it here, is to optimize the system. Alright, so your job is to get those students to work with you as colleagues to study the system of learning, understand is it working or not, right? So how would we know it's working?   0:08:20.7 DL: Well, if you understand a system, you understand that there are outputs. So when students go on to the next level, is it working? It's pretty... It's actually pretty easy to measure that, right? So if I'm a third grade teacher teaching third grade math, am I sending students onto fourth grade math, continually getting better and better every year, and more and more of them are achieving to higher and higher levels every single year? Well, I can measure that pretty easily. I can just get the fourth grade math scores, or I could go to fourth grade teachers and find out, how are these kids doing?   0:09:01.2 AS: It's such an interesting... You're making me think about it, because really what education is, is it seems to me like it's a service, and it's a process, and if... And it's something that's repeated over and over again just like on a... In a business, we have many processes that are repeated over again. And when you improve that... Imagine that one school went on a mission to continually improve. And they're constantly looking at how to improve, and they have iterations every term as they go through these lessons. Imagine if they were focused on that, students would flock to them from around the world to come to get that transformation of learning and that experience and of learning the output and say, "I wanna come out of this process where those other people are, where I've really gained that knowledge." So am I right about that? Is there anything that you would add to that?   0:10:06.2 DL: Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And I think that's what Deming is giving here. I mean, it sounds simple, that as a leader or a manager, you're supposed to explain what a system is and how it works, but there's a lot of depth there about... And you mentioned continual improvement. Well, is your system continually getting better year after year, or are you just doing the same thing, you're no worse this year than you were last year kinda thing? I used to... I had an uncle, he's in his 90s now. But he taught eighth grade social studies, I think for something like almost forty years. And every year or two, family reunions or something, I'd get together. I'd talk to him about what I was doing and things [chuckle] like that. And we were talking about the system in the classroom and getting better every year, and he just looked at me blankly like I was a complete idiot. And I said, "Don't you do that?" and he said, "No." He said, "Give me a date." I said, "What do you mean give you a date?" And he said "Just give me a date." And I said, "Okay, March 15th," or something. "We'll be on page 286 in the textbook, we'll be studying this, 77% of the kids will be failing the test." I just...   0:11:31.1 DL: My mouth just dropped open, because it was a system totally set up for poor performance, and he didn't see it's his job at all to help kids understand the system they were in or try to optimize it or try to make it better, or... That wasn't his job, right? And I remember at Deming conferences, Deming would often say, "A lot of people don't know what their job is."   0:12:00.2 AS: Yeah.   0:12:00.8 DL: I remember, oftentimes people would get up and ask questions, and he would [chuckle] say, "Sounds like you don't know what your job is." [laughter]   0:12:07.3 AS: I remember being a 24 year old...   0:12:07.9 DL: And that's sad confronting it. [chuckle] Yeah.   0:12:12.1 AS: Twenty four year old kid listening to that when I was in my Deming seminars, and I was just like, "Whoa," listening to the way he responded to these older men and women that were in the audience was kinda shocking for me as a young guy.   0:12:23.3 DL: Yeah, a lot of times he's talking to CEOs, he's talking to major [chuckle] people in the military or politics or whatever kinda thinking. But to me, that's how deep this point is. So are you explaining the aims of the system? Well, that first implies that you do have an aim of the system. So, go back...   0:12:45.5 AS: Yeah, and so just to highlight for the listeners. So this very short point, number one that he makes starts with this discussion that we've just had about the meaning of a system. And now David is going on to talk about, "Okay, not just the meaning. Okay, now you got that. The question is, What is the aim of this system?"   0:13:07.0 DL: Right. So again, if we go back to our example of it was a third grade math teacher. Well, what is the aim of the system? [chuckle] Right? What are you... And are you working with students to actually produce the aim of the system, aim of this classroom, right? And it's not just a matter of just coming up with a phrase that you're gonna put on the wall or something, it's the idea that you're gonna keep communicating that constantly to people, what's the aim of this system. So if you think about if you're supposed to optimize a classroom, well, optimization, we're gonna get the highest number of students to the highest possible level we can get them to in the time that we have to do that, right? And so, if you start thinking like that, this changes your job, because you start to realize, "Wow, I'm supposed to optimize this group of students to the highest level I can get them in the nine months or however... 10 months or however long you have to work with these people. And that is confronting. And if you start to understand that, you start to realize why Deming was so adamant against grading systems, how grading systems just defeat kids.   0:14:36.4 DL: So instead of thinking that we're supposed to be spending all of your time figuring out a grading system... Oh, my gosh, over the years, I have heard so many grading systems. And teachers talk about five points for this and 10 points for that, and then I deduct 10 points if they don't do this and if it's not on time and... Wow. Well, pretty soon you start to think that's your job. That my job is to create this grading system, and then you forget all about, "No, my job is to optimize the system." So if I go through a chapter in math, and I'm teaching a particular concept, and then maybe I give students a test on that. And Deming's not saying he's against testing, he says he's against grading and ranking people. That's totally different. And if I give this class a test, and they all do really poorly on [chuckle] this section of math, I just don't say, "Oh well," and go on, because I haven't done my job, I haven't really optimized that. So one of the first things in the system you'd wanna do is to go back and figure out, "Hey guys, what happened?"   0:15:50.0 DL: We only got an average of 66% for the whole class on this concept, or... Did I not teach it well enough? Did I... And when I started asking students like colleagues and saying, "Hey, what happened?" they told me things that I didn't wanna hear, like, "You talk too fast," or, "I couldn't understand your accent," or, "We didn't have enough time to work," or just a whole host of real issues from their perspective about what was going on, how you could optimize the system. So then I've got two problems. I got the problems of today, that we gotta re-work this chapter, right? We gotta go back and do it again and optimize that so people do understand this concept. And then the problem of tomorrow was how do I make sure this never happens again, that I never find myself in this same place? But I don't just accept poor performance and just go on, because when you're doing that in a system, especially a system in education where learning is the product, right? Well, what I learn in... What I don't learn in September is going to be magnified by March, April, et cetera, 'cause I didn't learn those concepts back there that I need for subsequent concepts, and therefore, I'm gonna get further and further behind. So as teacher, you're actually just...   0:17:18.6 AS: That's so much damage.   0:17:19.7 DL: Yeah, you're just shooting yourself in the foot when you just go on and just accept poor performance. And so...   0:17:27.8 AS: Well, that... The corollary is of course in manufacturing, in any process, if you're not focusing on the beginning of that process and the design aspect, you build in all kinds of problems that multiply. And that's so critical. I'm just curious, so we've got the meaning of a system, and we've got the aim in the system, and you've talked about highest number of students to the highest level in the time that we have. Also, I'm thinking about my own... In my valuation masterclass boot camp, I always say, and I repeat it, and you said something about repeating, and it made me think, I always say... I mean, every single time I speak to my students, "The valuation master class is about transformation not information." And I set in their minds, the point is I want them to make a true transformation in their thinking. And just by identifying this aim, they become... They think, "What am I talk... What is Andrew talking about? I don't see a transformation, where would that come from? What would that be?" But I'm telling you at the last time that we meet on the final of the six weeks, each person explains the transformation that they went through.   0:18:45.2 AS: And it wasn't due... It wasn't mainly due to the content, it was due to the process and all the experience as a whole. I'm just curious.   0:18:58.2 DL: So you're making it clear...   0:19:00.9 AS: How does that clear?   0:19:00.9 DL: Yeah, you're making it clear the aim of that system. I'll ask, sometimes I'll ask teachers, I say, "What's the aim of your system?" And they'll look at me blankly. Sometimes I get answers like, "To get through it." Well, if that's your aim, that's exactly what you're gonna do, right? "I'm just gonna get through it. I don't care if people learn it or not. I don't care about the product of learning, I'm just gonna get through it. That's my job." And if upper level management is pushing that, and, "You must be here on January 12th, and you must be here on February 2nd. And if you're not, then you're gonna get in trouble, right?" Well, you're not really caring about the product of learning at all, right? Your job is just to get through it.   0:19:49.0 AS: And how does this differ from, let's say another... I don't know if you would call it an aim or not, but there's a final assignment in my valuation masterclass boot camp, which is that you've gotta do a complete valuation of a company, submit it and then present it. And that's the final... If they can't do that, they don't graduate. What's the difference between that final assignment versus me talking about transformation, not information?   0:20:18.0 DL: Well, I think what you're saying is really good, but I'd wanna look at my statistical data, the variation of that class, and if 40% of the students can't do that, there's something wrong with my process, right? So I've gotta spend extra time with these students and get them caught up and get... Because they weren't able to do that. And then I wanna take the feedback that I get now, apply it in the systems thinking can to my next master class and say, "Okay, how do I prevent the very problems that I had before?" And it's actually pretty easy to track until you get down to maybe only one student is not able to do that at the end of the master class. And then you lower the variation even more, so only one student every three years doesn't make it, right? Because I'm so good at dealing with special causes, issues, setting this up in the beginning, and talking about the aim, et cetera, that I've lowered the variation until it's just very, very rare. And that's really a special cause.   0:21:38.4 AS: Yeah. Well, we have cases...   0:21:38.4 DL: You have to visit a specialist.   0:21:40.2 AS: Where someone's gotten sick, or something in there.   0:21:42.4 DL: Of course.   0:21:42.6 AS: But I just to follow up on that, what I was noticing in my first couple of the... We're now on the seventh iteration, and in my first couple ones, I realized these final reports are not that great, because what's happening is, I'm overloading them with information for the first four weeks. And then in the last two weeks, I'm saying, "Now, finish this report." So I work with the team, and I said, "Why don't we assign them the company they're gonna value six weeks from now, on day one, number one. Number two is, the students were complaining there wasn't enough feedback, so why don't we break the assignments down week by week, and we're gonna tell 'em what they gotta get done by Friday, and then we have feedback Friday, where one member of their team presents that. And then, we give them feedback on it, and all of a sudden we're starting to build towards this final report week by week, and I just realized I should have been doing this all along as we go through this iteration, so it's a good reminder.   0:22:43.7 DL: Yeah. But you learned, and you listened to the students and they said, "Oh, we gotta have this kind of feedback all the way through." Okay, well, that means you as the manager, you have to make an adjustment in the system and the process of what you're doing, and then it's a PDSA cycle, right? You try one class and you say, "Okay, I'm gonna make this adjustment, and I'm gonna look at the data now and compare it to the data before and see, did it work? If it did, I'm gonna do this with all my classes, because I found out something that's making a huge difference for people through that process, so...   0:23:17.1 AS: Yeah. And the feedback was hard to get, David, when I could see the problem, the students talked about the problem that they were overwhelmed, and but what the answer to that was, was that, "Oh, man, they are asking for one-on-one feedback, and how can I do that with 100 students, with 500 students?" And then, the point is, is that once you raise the problem, then it opens your mind to think, "How could we solve it?" And my solution was, "Well, wait a minute. That they're making the same mistakes a lot of cases, so if we just create feedback Friday, we tell them, "You are getting feedback," and then we focus in on a small number of them, but let them all observe and then we accomplish the same thing that they wanted, but they wanted it in one-on-one, which wasn't scalable for us, which would have been difficult. So getting the information back, that's a bit painful, and I'm like, "I can't do that," but being aware of it then allowed us to come up with some alternative. So yeah.   0:24:19.1 DL: Because I don't know how many times I heard Dr. Deming say at seminars, "It's not the answer that's important, it's the question. And do you have that right?" So when you start asking the question, "Well, how do I do this with 100 students?" Okay. Well, now you're asking the right question. Right? And there's always a way. There's always a method. But instead of saying, "Oh, I can't do that, it's not possible. I don't have time for that." Well, okay, then it's never gonna happen then, is it?   0:24:49.3 AS: David, is that what my mom meant...   0:24:49.7 DL: But as soon as ypu start asking the right...   0:24:51.3 AS: When she said, "You're jumping to conclusions?"   0:24:53.1 DL: Yeah. As soon as you start asking the right question, then you'll start to solve the real problem. So I wanted to get to the third sentence here before we run out of time. There's a lot in just this one...   0:25:06.2 AS: It's amazing.   0:25:06.5 DL: Point he makes. But he says, Dr. Deming wasn't into all the pronouns and everything that we use today. We always just used he, so, but he says, "He teaches his people to understand how the work of the group supports these aims." Ah. So I've got this group of students, right, and so I've explained to them what a system is, and that we are a system, and we work to develop an aim for that system. Okay, now I have to optimize these people working together to achieve that aim, right? I remember when I first started, I couldn't get rid of just grading kids, and keep my job, I still had to... So I had to figure out, "Well, how do I do that within a grading system, even though Deming says we should get rid of the grading system. And so, when I started talking to students, I said, "What would be the aim here?" And somebody said, "Well, our aim should be that everybody in the whole class would get an A." And I was just shocked, because at that point, that never happened in my history.   0:26:23.0 DL: Well, and partly the reasons that it was never gonna happen, was a huge part me purposely was doing things to make sure that everybody wasn't achieving at a high level, and then that sounds just like heresy, but most of education is built on that. I can guarantee you, especially like a high school teacher, if suddenly all of your kids are getting As and you're turning in your grades and everybody's got an A...   0:26:49.5 AS: You're in trouble.   0:26:50.2 DL: Yeah, you're not gonna get an award. [laughter] You're gonna get visited, alright.   0:26:56.8 AS: The statistics guy will come down and say, "No, this is impossible."   0:27:00.1 DL: Yeah, the principal, or the superintendent, or, "You're destroying the whole grading system," all those kinds of things will come into play, but in reality, you should be having that person teach all the other teachers, what are they doing? What are you doing? And we're not talking about just giving them As just for the sake of giving them As. But they've established a system that almost everyone always get... Does A level work. Well, you're gonna have to do what Deming talks in this third sentence about how the work of the group supports these aims, so how do we work together as a class to support each other, so everybody can get there? That's totally different than the stereotypical classroom where I say, "Sit down, don't talk, don't talk to your neighbor. If you talk out loud, you're gonna get points taken off your grade," and those kinds of things. That's much different when I say, "Hey, we need to all work together." And so what happens if somebody struggles, or takes a little longer? Or what could we do to support them? That's a whole different kind of a way to think.   0:28:20.2 AS: Ah. There's so much to that, and the idea too, that sometimes teachers, and maybe managers in companies are really busy, and so they feel like, "I just don't have time to explain all of this." And so they end up leaving either employees, or students in the dark knowing that it is a little bit like driving in the foggy conditions. All the students see is ruts right in front of them, they're not seeing the aim. And as a result, they really... It's just a routine. "Just go in and do whatever they say, because we don't really know where we're going."   0:29:02.1 DL: Right. So we use the example of a classroom as a system here today, but whatever level of a system you are, if you're a principal, oh, well, your system is the whole school, right? If you're superintendent, your systems the whole district, or whoever you are he's talking about, your job is to do the same thing. Are you explaining to everybody in the entire organization what the system is, number one, and does it have an aim, and how can we work together to optimize this aim for the whole system? And I remember talking to a major CEO of a huge multi-international corporation, and that she was... Had worked with Deming also, and I said, "Well, how do you go about that?" She said, "Every single year, at the beginning of the year, I do 10 days of training with all managers worldwide." I thought, "Holy cow." [chuckle] That's huge, right? And who's doing the training? She is, the CEO, because she wants it coming directly from her, "This is our job, this is our aim, and our job is to optimize the system."   0:30:20.7 DL: And she didn't just do it once and then go back to her office. She said, "No, every year I've got new managers, and I've got new people come on board and we have new levels of discussion and new depth to take it to." Well, it's the same thing in a classroom, right? I'm better and better, I get faster and faster at setting the aim with this group of students. I get better and better coming up with metaphors of how to explain a system, even to preschool kids, or... And I get better and better at coaching people to support each other and help each other to achieve the overall aim. And then I use my statistics to see "Is it working? Am I actually getting better at that?"   0:31:08.2 AS: I was just thinking kind of a little bit of an inspirational thing, is to tell students that, "The aim here is to figure out the best way to get to where we're going for the benefit of the next class, the next group of students. And how could we take the way I'm explaining this particular subject and improve upon it so that the next group gets it even better? What an inspirational thing. So...   0:31:41.8 DL: Yeah, I remember a teacher that really took this to heart, and so what she would do is, she would take next year's students that she was going to have, and she'd have them come to a sort of a field trip to her class this year, and have her current students explain how we do things here, and what we do and everything. Now she's going upstream in the process in the system, and so kids were actually anticipating, "Hey, when we get to her class, oh, we have to do this, and we have to think like this." And then she had... She went to students that had left her class and asked them, "How did I do? Did you have the kind of learning that you needed for the next stage in that class," and then she used that feedback to change the system that she's in now, so...   0:32:31.9 AS: And that also makes you think about the wider system of a school, where there's a connection between the curriculum so that people see like, "Okay, there's a reason why our teacher, Mr. Tyler, that taught me pre-algebra, made me underline and write out each step in the solving of that algebra equation, because he knew I was gonna need it in the next level."   0:33:00.6 DL: Yeah, very good.   0:33:03.5 AS: So shall we wrap up?   0:33:05.5 DL: Yes.   0:33:07.3 AS: Okay. So just to wrap up for the listeners and the viewers out there, we're talking about... We're just kicking off a series on the role of a manager in education, and it's based upon Dr. Deming's writing in "The New Economics," in the Third Edition, it starts on page 86. And in the Second Edition, it starts on page 125. And the title of his list of 14 things is, "Role of a Manager of People. This is the new role of a manager of people after transformation." And just to review some of the things that we went through with that just first point, the first thing that we had talked about, is that classroom teacher is a manager of people ultimately, and we talked about three things that come out of that. The first thing that comes out of this first point is, you wanna teach what is the meaning of a system? The inputs, the process, the output, you've gotta start with that. If people don't understand that they're operating within a system, then they can't make the progress. Remember that students, as you've said, David, are not products, they're not inanimate objects, the product is actually the learning itself, and so the objective is to manage to optimize that learning process.   0:34:23.8 AS: The second thing that we talked about was that people need to understand what is the aim of the system? Okay, fine, it's good enough that we need to understand that things work as a system, but what are we aiming for? And you propose, "Well, maybe highest number of students to the highest level in the time that we have." So once people understand the aim, they understand where we're going, and then it brings the third part of this one, which is, so how does the work of the group support the aim? And I would say that this is part of the concept that Dr. Deming talked about, about bringing meaning to work, bringing the value to work that you have a role in this, and that is to get to that aim, so we have a common mission, a common goal, and we're working towards that, and that's an environment that I think everybody wants to either work in, in a school environment, or in a work environment. Is there anything you would add to that wrap up?   0:35:20.1 DL: Well, there's these phrases like joy in work that Deming talked about and joy in learning. How do you get there? Well, here you go, here's the first step. [chuckle] Because when I understand my job in that system, and my job is to help other people also achieve, I have joy in what I do. My relationships can flourish, right? I can share information, I could support other people, and that's really part of the human condition, and it makes it actually fun to go to school.   0:35:55.9 AS: Well, what a great way to end that discussion, fun to go to school. David, 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, and we are talking about "The New Economics," so you can get that on Amazon, just go to amazon.com and download it, or buy the hard cover. And listeners can learn more about David at langfordlearning.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz. And I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming and this discussion today kind of explains where it comes from, "People are entitled to joy in work.”

In this new series on applying Deming to education, Andrew talks with John Dues, Chief Learning Officer at United Schools Network and long-time Deming practitioner. This is the first in a series of 12 episodes using John's school system as a case study for applying Deming in education. 0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm here with featured guest, John Dues. John, are you ready to share your Deming journey? 0:00:17.7 John Dues: Yeah, Andrew I'm really glad to be here and looking forward to speaking with you today. 0:00:22.6 AS: Yeah, we've been talking about this for a while, and so it's exciting to kick it off. So let me introduce you to the audience. Ladies and gentlemen, John A. Dues is an accomplished education systems leader and Improvement Science scholar practitioner with more than two decades of experience. He is the Chief Learning Officer of the United Schools Network, where he directs the network's continual improvement fellowship and serves as an Improvement Advisor. He draws heavily on the work of Dr. W. Edwards Deming and his System of Profound Knowledge. He's currently continuing his education through the Improvement Advisor program at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Boston, Massachusetts. John, can you take a little bit and tell us about the story about how you first learned about the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming and what hooked you? 0:01:21.8 JD: Yeah, happy to do that. I sort of, I'm about 20 years into my career as an educator, and I sort of think about my career across four stages or so. Stage zero, I was a teacher, I didn't really know anything about classroom management or how to lead a class, it was a lot of trial and error type learning, and then I start to figure stuff out over time and stage one, I transitioned into now working at a series of Public Charter Schools is on the founding team of seven schools or non-profits sort of than this next stage. And I think a lot of my learning was sort of what I would call subject matter learning, so cognitive science, curriculum and lesson planning, how to use data to drive instruction, those types of things, and then about 2016 or so, I started learning about improvement science. I got an e-mail, it mentioned a book called Learning to Improve, and that got me sort of started on this path to learning the tools of improvement science, and I did that for four or five years, and then in about a couple of years ago, I stumbled across the W. Edwards Deming Institute website. 0:02:53.0 JD: And I had previously come to the website a couple of years earlier, and truth be told, I went to the System of Profound Knowledge page, it didn't make a lot of sense to me, and so I sort of let it lay for a year or two, and I came back to it in 2020, and not that all of a sudden it made sense. But there was something there that sparked this interest that's been going on for three years now, where I've devoured books, listened to interviews, and really gone on this journey to learn exactly what Dr. Deming was talking about with the System of Profound Knowledge. 0:03:36.5 AS: And when you think about the improvements that you're trying to do, or the problems that you were trying to solve, and then you started to see, let's say the System of Profound Knowledge, what was it that stood out as, Oh, that explains why this is happening, that explains why... What were some of those revelations and things that you could then bring back to your work... I'm just curious. How did that unfold? 0:04:06.2 JD: Yeah, it took some time. I mentioned sort of discovering the Institute website in about 2018 or so, and it not initially making a lot of sense, there's probably two things. One, candidly, I saw a System of Profound Knowledge, and I was like, Well, who talks like that? What is that... Like who calls their stuff profound knowledge? And then the second thing was when I looked over the four components, systems theory and the theory of variation and the theory of knowledge and psychology, frankly, most of it was incomprehensive to me, and a couple of years later, I come back, I'm a little further in this learning journey, and I go back to it, not that I had any type of instant revelation or anything like that, it has taken a lot of deep study, it did start to slowly make sense and what I realized... In one of the books I was reading is sort of this idea that there's these two complementary types of knowledge, one is subject matter knowledge, so in my case, it's those things I mentioned, knowing how to plan lessons, knowing how to do classroom management, the things that an educator that needs to know how to do. 0:05:28.3 JD: And then there was this whole other bucket of knowledge, which I realized when Deming said System of Profound Knowledge he meant the components interact, that's the system part. And then the profound part is just that you have a deep knowledge about your organization across those four components, and I realize there's this whole other sort of bucket of knowledge that we're not attending to, that tells us some of the most important information we need to know about our organizations, and it's only when you bring those two things together, the subject matter knowledge with the profound knowledge that you actually then can transform your organizations. And so that realization along the way was a big part of me sort of latching on to Dr. Deming's philosophy. And I'd say the second thing that I did very early on, besides reading the books and listening to a lot of the Deming Institute's podcast interviews was I started talking to people that appeared on those interviews, and so I reached out to Kelly Allan and then he turned me on to David Langford, who's probably the guy doing Deming in Education and started relationships with both of them, and they were very, very generous with their time and expertise, and that really allowed me to clarify my thinking now because I have this expert in Deming philosophy helping to guide me answer questions, and sort of that rounded out some of the knowledge I was doing in my self-study. 0:07:02.4 AS: Which I guess accelerates things. In my age when I was young, I sat into two seminars with Dr. Deming teaching and yeah. Okay, that answers a lot of questions, but we don't have that luxury anymore, so it's gotta be number one, reading the materials, watching the videos and all that, but also checking our understanding. And I know both Kelly and David are great resources. Kelly helped me when I was writing my book, Transform Your Business with Dr. Deming's 14 Points to help me think about things, and I know there's even more, so much more to learn, and I think that's where... What I think about the profound knowledge aspect, and I think what you said was, there's kind of... You have to have these two components. And its subject matter aspect, that's just a given when you're teaching and understanding how to teach, but then this whole other thing about the system aspect of it, the psychology aspect of that. 0:08:09.0 AS: And I have a question for you about education, let's say I graduated from high school, from a pretty good public high school in Ohio, and I'm just curious, if we went back to that school today, and I spent... I don't know what it was, seven hours a day at school, arrive at 8:00 and leave at 3:00 or whatever that was. I spent X amount of time at school and I accumulated X amount of knowledge during that time, and my question to you is, if we go now from 1983 when I graduated to here we are 50 years later, or so or 40... 50 years later, so now we're... Here we are in the future with so much knowledge, so much experience, our students are attending high school for either the same time and accumulating much more knowledge, or are they attending school for a much shorter time and accumulating the same amount of knowledge, or are we doing the same thing? 0:09:28.3 JD: Yeah, that's a really good question. I think there's sort of a relevant Deming quote that's something to the effect of "experience teaches nothing" and it's, basically it was saying, you have to have an underlying theory and then you build the knowledge and testing that theory and see how it works in the real world. So in a lot of respects, I think in the 40 years or so since you were in high school, probably a lot of schools haven't changed much, they do the same thing year in and year out, they're not really learning, they're... Like I said, across that 40-year time period, it's just sort of a repetition. Now, of course, if you went into that high school, there would be differences like the type of technology you'd see in classrooms. I think by and large, when you're talking about school, effectiveness people will argue about this, I think depending on how you're measuring that outcome, I think that schools are, generally speaking, better maybe than they were 40 years ago. Now, the problem is that better typically means that test scores are better, and of course, there's variation in this in both time and place and the variation, I don't think it's linear. 0:10:58.1 JD: I think there are ups and downs in different places based on a whole host of factors like the pandemic or even... There's less spending in schools out of the 2008 hiring crisis... Oh sorry, housing crisis, and those had an impact on things like test scores, but I think with Deming, and he was very interested obviously in education, he was a professor for 50 years, as you know at New York University. The subtitle of his last book had education in the subtitle. What he was really talking about when he was thinking about talking about education was transformation, and that was a complete change in state. And so when I hear your question, that's what I think of... I think of have schools, if they know the Deming philosophy, have they undergone a transformation following Deming's teachings, and I would say by and large, the answer to that question, not withstanding the sort of test score question, the answer to the transformation question is no. I think by and large, that's not what I've seen across my career. 0:12:11.6 AS: And if we think about a person listening into this conversation who's an educator and they're looking for new answers to maybe old problems. [chuckle] And they come across this podcast, they come across the material like you did, what's the hope that you can provide to them about how they could benefit either individually by thinking about and learning about Dr. Deming's teachings for their performance as a... Maybe as a teacher or as an administrator, and what hope or excitement can you provide them if they're an administrator of a school thinking, "Hmm, this is interesting, maybe this could provide me some things that I need to start to think differently about it." Tell me a little bit about the journey of you then learning about Deming and then start to... Bringing it into your institution. 0:13:11.2 JD: Yeah, there's a few things that I think of. So one thing is, if I've discovered the Deming philosophy and I'm an educator, how do I bring that to my school, or how do I bring that to my classroom or if I"m a systems leader, how do I bring that to my school district? And I think one of the things that I learned from David is you preach to the masses and work with the willing, and so thinking about intrinsic motivation, which I know David has talked about on your podcast, is you want people to opt in to going on this sort of learning journey with you, so that's one thing I think of. 0:13:50.8 JD: The second thing I think of is, and this was from David as well, when he started doing the Deming philosophy in his classroom and using the System of Profound Knowledge, he was a classroom teacher. And so everybody has this circle of influence, this circle that they have control over, and in his case, he didn't have control over the school building, the high school where he was... He didn't have control over the school district at the time, but he did have control over his classroom, and it was basically through applying the Deming ideas in his classroom that people started coming and saying, "Hey, what are you doing in here? There's something very different that's going on here," and then the principal got so interested in it, he said, "I'd like you to sort of teach people how to do this building-wide," and he became the director of continuous improvement there at his high school in Alaska. 0:14:42.6 JD: And then ultimately, he was encouraged by Deming to go off and consult across the world to bring these ideas to schools all over the world. So I think that's another thing that I think of. I also think that in some sort of ways, you can learn aspects of the Deming philosophy and start to apply them tomorrow. So when I think about something like knowledge about variation, I may know nothing about the technical aspects of a control chart, for example, but what I can do is I can take any data that I have that occurs across time and just plot those dots on a simple line chart and start to understand what that data looks like versus having those numbers in a spreadsheet, and then there's other aspects that do take time. 0:15:34.1 JD: I think one thing that Deming said in one of his books was, there's no instant pudding, and basically he meant that when it comes to organizational transformation, you're talking about a four or five or even 10-year journey and beyond to get this to take root in an organization. At the same time, it doesn't take 1000 people. And I heard David talk about this, and I heard Deming talk about this idea of you need to capture and educate and bring along about the square root of the number of people in your organization that really have a strong grasp of the System of Profound Knowledge and so if you're in a roughly 100-person organization, like mine I need 10 people that have learned these ideas and are interested in spreading them to their classroom or to their school, or in our case, into the network as a whole. 0:16:32.2 AS: And how did it go finding those people, and as you say, it's voluntary, you want those people to come, you wanna attract them, attraction rather than promotion. How did that journey go for you internally? 0:16:43.9 JD: Well, it's definitely ongoing. It's definitely ongoing, and I think it's going really well, it's a process, we're probably about two years into that process, and so in some ways it's now a core part of who we are. So a good example of that is going back to this idea of knowledge about variation two years ago, none of us had any knowledge of what a control chart or a process behavior chart was, and now we have dashboards that are shared system-wide on all kinds of measures that are important to us, where we're now looking at data over time and realizing that until we sort of understand the patterns that we see in that data, we don't really know anything about whatever that area is. So that's something that's taken hold and we've spread it pretty quickly across the network. Before we would say we overreact to maybe like a single test score or attendance is down this month. Now we step back and say, "Okay, what does that look like over 12 months, for 15 or 20 months? What are the patterns? Is it sort of a common cause, is it just a part of our system, or is there a signal here that we need to pay attention to." 0:18:01.4 JD: So in many aspects like that it's taken hold and in other aspects, it does take longer to implement and that... A good example there is, Deming said abolish grades, and he was pretty unequivocal about that he didn't good grades in his graduate statistical courses at NYU. That's a much harder thing to change, it's a much harder thing to get people to understand why he said that, even for myself to learn sort of... Why did he say that? Is it feasible? What's the replacement? Those all have... There's practical considerations when you're in a school system, you have to give grades, you have to have report cards, or you think you do anyway, and so things like that take time, and we're not there yet on some of Deming's ideas, like abolishing grades or changing our grading practices. 0:19:01.4 AS: It's interesting, one of the beautiful things about having a private company is that you can implement these things without kind of... I don't know, kind of regulatory oversight or that type of stuff. You just can implement it, and so there's an enormous constraint in that field. Now, let me ask you about the charts that you talk about. I wanna ask two questions. First question is, from your experience of having, looking at different charts related to education, if someone's listening to this, that it is working in a school or a classroom or whatever, they're looking at it, what would be one chart that you think that they could start on today and implement? And that's the first question I have, and the second one is about how do you prevent people from obsessing about the data in a chart and help them understand that this is about understanding a system, it's not obsessing about some KPI type of thing. So, curious what you would say to that. What would be a chart that someone could start with? 0:20:13.8 JD: That's a really good question. I have a lot of different ideas. One thing because it's so prevalent in our education system it's pretty much across the United States, is state test scores. Now in some of the aspects or... Yeah, I mean in some aspects, it's not the best thing to put in a chart because they typically only happen one time a year towards the end of the year. So it's hard to gather enough data to sort of use in practice on a day-to-day basis. On the flip side, I do think it's helpful to put something like state test scores, even though they only happen on an annual basis in a control chart or a process behavior chart, because I think people forget, frankly, they forget what happened just a couple of years ago in their system when it comes to state test scores. And so you see all these documents created all the way from State Departments of Education to individual schools that are marketing to parents in their area that basically are writing fiction about their test scores. "We improved from last year." Well, yeah, technically, maybe it went up 2%, but then it's down 5% from two years ago. And so I think plotting the dots to your test score data over 12 or 15 years gives a sense of how the data is bouncing around in average probably. 0:21:41.8 AS: Okay. 0:21:43.0 JD: And not in a meaningful way. I think in most circumstances. And I think allowing them to see those patterns is really important. And I think another sort of helpful layer to that is annotate that chart with things that have happened in either your school, your district, or even at a state policy level. Label when the test format changed. Label when the state standards change. Label the year that what kids needed to do to be you considered proficient, the cut score for the proficiency, label when that changed, 'cause these are all things that have happened in the last five or six years in most states, including Ohio where I am. And when you start to label those things and then you see the ups and downs that are associated with those labels, you start to say, "Oh, this picture of what's been happening in my system makes a lot more sense." And most of that is completely sort of out of the picture for most people. We don't really remember what happened three or four years ago, even if we have a general idea, we don't have it pinpointed to a specific year. When do we start testing on computers instead of paper and pencil? That's another example. Those all have impacts on tests scores. 0:23:01.2 AS: Okay. That's a great one for the administrators, but if you were in a classroom and you say, "I don't really have control over what goes on in my school so much, but I do enjoy this Deming journey, and I want to start to bring some of that into my classroom," what would be one chart that you would make? 0:23:23.1 JD: A couple of ideas that come to mind, maybe two, I'd share with you. One would be something like homework completion. What percent of the kids are doing either in class or it doesn't have to be homework, it would be in-class assignments? And I think the key here is, one, you have to operationally define what completion means. And that can vary by a classroom as long as everybody's on the same page. And then with that, put it up on the wall, on a piece of chart paper, because so often the things that we want kids to improve are hidden from them. They don't... Oh, I didn't know that 35% of the kids in this class didn't do the assignment from the day before right, but if they start to see that, and then we start to talk about it, and then we start to say, "Well, what are the barriers or obstacles to completion?" 0:24:13.9 JD: And then kids start to say, "Well, how can I help you?" You start to create this completely different mentality in your classroom. One classroom also that we had in our network of schools, it was a fourth grade Science teacher, she started tracking how much joy did you find in today's lesson? And so she would actually... The kids would do a short little survey and assign a number out of 100%. And then they would also have us. There was a spot in the survey to say, "What did you like about it, what didn't go so well? Or whatever, what could I improve?" This is the teacher saying that to fourth graders and they're charting that on a piece of paper. And then she's starting to learn, "Okay. These types of lessons are engaging, these types of lessons are not so engaging. The kids want more of this, enjoyment goes up when we do this as a class." And then they did that over the course of three or four months, and slowly over time, you see the engagement levels, the joy raising, kids are happier. They're more engaged in class. The teacher is having more fun. And so those are just sort of two things that I've seen done in our network of schools that I think had a really positive impact. 0:25:33.9 AS: That's exciting. And I think it goes back to the intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. And ultimately kids wanna be engaged, everybody wants to be engaged in what they're going through. And the reason why they disengage oftentimes, is because we don't involve them. 0:25:55.9 JD: Right. Yeah, I agree, 100%. I think kids are really... Students and schools are the improvement secret weapon. I think a mindset shift for me was when you think about in your system, who is the worker? And a lot of educators think when you ask them that question, they'll say, "Well, teachers." And not that there's a right or wrong answer to this, but I think it's actually the students, because the thing that has to be created, high quality learning has to happen in their minds. So if they're the ones where the work has to happen, they have to be the workers. So I think of students as the workers and I think more of the teachers as the supervisors of that work. 0:26:43.6 AS: That's a great way to think about it, because it also kind of pushes it down for the teachers to think that their objective is really creating that environment for learning. I wonder when you started bringing the Deming philosophy into schools and your operations there, was there one point that was like there was resistance to or what do you think is the hardest to digest for teachers or a school system when they're looking at this? 0:27:21.6 JD: That's a really good question. I think in my own sort of personal opinion, I think that a lot of the Deming philosophy is paradoxical to typical management practices. And I think there's a lot of counterintuitive ideas in the philosophy. So I think you have to sort of be open to that from the start. And so when I first started talking with people about these ideas, I did it, both internally and with some people externally, and I just put together a presentation, I said, "I'm gonna show you this thing and I wanna collect your thoughts." And one of the first things I said is, "Before I say anything, I want you to have in your mind preemptively that you're gonna experience some serious cognitive dissonance with these ideas because they're so different than what you've heard before." So I did that as a primer, so people sort of had that expectation. I think, generally, what I find from folks is openness to the ideas. I think there's a challenge in unpacking, going back to something like I was talking about abolish grades. Unpacking why exactly did he say what he said? Whether it's abolish grades or any number of other points that he made. 0:28:52.4 JD: I think there's this sort of realization for a lot of people that when you say, "Well, what's your philosophy, or what's your educational philosophy, what's your management philosophy?" They don't really have an answer. I didn't have an answer, frankly, before I started studying this stuff. And that's a little bit convicting. And then once you decide to go on the journey, you realize, "Why do we do the things that we do?" You could ask that about a thousand things a day, whether it's a policy, a practice, just something we do, 'cause that's the way we've always done it here. And again, it's a little daunting when you start to think about, "Well, what is the underlying reason that we do this?" And so... 0:29:40.3 AS: It kind of shakes the foundation of your thinking. 0:29:43.1 JD: Yeah. It shakes the foundation, so you have to be open to that. And I think that's where the, "No instant pudding," quote from Deming comes in, is that you really have to be committed to this. And I think about a story I read in a book, Henry Neave's book, The Deming Dimension, where he basically says, "A Board engineer, a quality control guy comes to a Deming seminar one week, a four-day seminar, goes back the following week and he read the 14 Points. And one of them's about inspection and not relying or overlying on inspection. And he went the next week and fired all the inspectors in his plant." I think it was a Ford Plant. 0:30:32.7 JD: And basically, Henry Neave says, "That's not the right approach. You have to understand why you're doing what you're doing first before you do it." And you have to remember that that thing, in this case, it's inspection is a part of your system, so you can't remove it before you understand why you're doing that and what you're gonna replace it with. And that should probably happen deliberately and probably over time and not the next Monday after you've heard this idea. So it's a little of both. It's how do you start moving the needle and then how do you do it thoughtfully with an underlying understanding of the theory under all of these ideas? 0:31:13.7 AS: Another question is, if we think about the... Really, you have to, if you're bringing the Deming philosophy into a school as an example, you have to kind of convince administrators and you have to kind of... Let's say educate administrators, you gotta educate the teachers, and also there's the kids. And I'm curious, what are the things that teachers really get from the Deming like, "Okay, that makes sense." And let's strip away some of the complexity sometimes in the way that it's presented, but let's just take some of the basic principles, what are some of the things that the kids would naturally get like that makes sense to them? I'm just curious what your observations have been there. 0:32:01.8 JD: That's a really good question. How would I answer that? I think I'd start with myself first. I think because Deming talked about an individual transformation has to happen as a precursor to a larger organizational transformation. And so for me, it was starting to take many of the ideas I was reading and then think about the application in my own life, maybe as a student myself. And as I did that and I thought through those things, I never came up against something that didn't make sense to me. I think the trick is, especially for adults, is that I think in a lot of ways, a lot of people would latch on to the ideas for themselves, but this won't work for... Other people need something different. [laughter] 0:33:06.1 JD: I think that's... A good example of it is like performance appraisals. They've never been effective for me. I never have gotten great feedback from them, or I've felt they're unfair, or I got rated on my use of technology in my classroom early in my career, but there were no working computers, but everybody else needs a performance appraisal. So you come across a lot of stuff like that I think what you have to say, "Yep, that works for me in my life." And we have to take that same lesson and apply it to others, that's one thing I think about. It wasn't the exact question you asked, but that's one thing I think about. I actually find... There's things to learn in terms of teachers, but I actually think a lot of teachers sort of have a natural inclination for the general Deming perspective, Deming philosophy. I think things like grading, I think teachers would latch on to Deming's idea of abolishing grading, I think actually much faster than maybe the administrators would in a lot of ways. 0:34:13.3 AS: I think that would be a hard one for them. I remember when I went to my first Deming seminar and I was a young supervisor at a Pepsi factory in the US. And I appreciate that Pepsi put me into those seminars 'cause it really helped me, and I think I brought back stuff to the Pepsi factory in Torrance, California. But the one thing that really struck a cord with me is I didn't realize I was operating within a system. I saw individual efforts of myself and others and everybody running around trying to get things done, but I didn't see that the limitation on the output of our activity was, to a large extent, determined by the system within which we were operating. If we didn't have the resources, if we had an accounting department that was just trying to cut cost, and so we couldn't get the replacement parts for the machinery. I totally understood that once I studied Deming and learned about that. And so that's why I'm kind of thinking about what makes sense to teachers. 0:35:27.8 AS: So let's talk about kids for a moment. I think about joy in work, as Deming says, and just the intrinsic motivation. And I think about kids, they're just full of positive energy and rolling around, and there's just so much positive energy and it's like the world just starts beating them down over time. It's hard enough to overcome some of the challenges you're facing with your family at home, and then you come into a school and you've gotta operate within this framework. And it's like, I suspect that kids would appreciate the idea of bringing joy to the classroom, but what have you seen from kids? 0:36:11.5 JD: Well, I think you're onto something when you say, as kids sort of go on in their educational career, a lot of times are sort of beat down by certain aspects of the educational system. So I think one thing is there's a process to undo some of that. And that's probably what I see most with my own kids or students that I'm working with in our network. So if you ask a student or if you ask your own kids something like, "How was school today? Or how are you doing in science?" What they'll often tell you is a grade. "I got... I got... " "Okay, you had a test today. How was it?" "Well, I got a B." "Well, what did you learn?" And often times it's really hard to pull that out because they've been so trained to think about school as a series of grades or a series of silence, a series of percentages versus what did you learn? What are you taking from that? What does that mean? So I see a lot of that. I also see a lot of... There's a lot of reward and punishment that is a part of a lot of school systems, whether it's treasure boxes or reward systems in the classroom. And I was just as guilty as a teacher and frankly as a principal in that other school of having those systems. 0:37:49.0 JD: But when you say at the end of the day, "How was your day?" And they sort of tell you back what they were doing in the behavior point system versus what did they learn, and who did they talk to that day, and what did they take from the day. I think you quickly realize that even if the behavior system or the grading system had good intentions behind it, that kids are often experiencing those systems in a very different way. And so I think kids are very open to it, just like adults when you explain it, I think what's... The tough part is that they've been in the system that has all of these different sort of things that are wearing them down. And I think you have to unpack that and untie that and sort of re-educate I guess this, re-train them to think about school and academics and how they're interacting in school in a different way. 0:38:46.0 AS: And it makes you think that students are the secret weapon of the implementation of some of this, because I think there's a lot of... At first, when you come across the Deming material, it doesn't feel intuitive. It feels hard sometimes to understand, it can be confusing, but once you start to realize and understand it, you start to realize that there's a lot of intuitive nature of things. And a kid can observe random outcomes, and then they see adults rewarding random and then they're like, "Well, Johnny just got lucky in that particular thing or whatever." And so they can understand a lot of things, so maybe we can say that there is a little bit of a secret weapon there. 0:39:33.0 JD: Yeah, and kids are very intuitive, and so I think in going back to some of those rewards systems, I think one of the things that happens and we maybe don't pay enough attention to it, is as soon as there is a reward system, there's a game that starts. And so a good example of this is there's a number of reading, online reading programs where kids read a book and then they take a quiz that sort of assesses comprehension. And on the face it seems like a positive thing, oh, kids have read X number of words, I'll hear there's a lot, or X number of books, and they weren't reading before and this program gets him to read. But when you start to unpack that, you go ask a kid, "Well, what do you think of this program?" "Ah it's pretty boring, but I do get prizes." Or something like, "Well, I'm impressed, you've read 10 books this in the past couple of months, and that seems to be because you're doing this program." And he's like, "No, I just pick short books because I know I can read them faster." 0:40:41.9 JD: And so as soon as you start to put those you take sort of intrinsic nature of enjoying a book for the book's sake, for the story, and you instead tie it to some type of point system. There's all types of things, many of which are hidden that are the motivations just under the surface for why kids are doing what they're doing that you're missing because you're not talking to them, and not really listening to how they're responding to that reward system. So like even a positive thing like a reading program, that seems good on the face can often have an underlying darker nature that's going on. 0:41:17.9 AS: Yeah, and I think... I wanna wrap up this section of the discussion, and I think what I would like to wrap that up with is taking on what you were just saying is that when you are measuring anything and you find yourself wanting to add on additional measures, because they're getting... Things are getting disincentivized. So okay, now you say, "Okay, well, we've gotta track it by the length of books or we gotta track their eyeballs, or we gotta... " Every time that you find yourself having to add on some different type of measurement, I think it's a good time to step back and say, "What are we really doing here, and do we really understand the incentives that we're... The activities that we're really incentivizing by this, and are we really getting to our goal of that." And that's a painful discussion because as you say, you're still sometimes, you're gonna have to search for what's the replacement, what's the solution. But when you find yourself trying to add on more things to try to box the kids in, you're probably now caught up in this system of testing and scoring and measuring that is going out of control. 0:42:41.2 JD: Yeah, I think that's right. And the thing that I think of, and I can't remember where I saw it, if it was a Deming thing, or maybe I heard it from David Langford, it was a shift in perspective. In terms of your role as a teacher, or if you're the CEO of a company or the principal school, whatever it is, many of those folks myself included at one point, when you ask them what their job is, many people will tell you it's to motivate my students or motivate the people that work in my company. But probably a better frame is not to motivate them, but rather to remove the obstacles to them finding joy in learning or joy in work, and that's a different mindset, right? And so instead of incentivizing or coming up with different metrics in the case of that reading program, what I would be thinking about is, have I created a comfortable spot for kids to read in the classroom? Is there a good supply of books with lots of different interesting topics? Have I talked to kids about what they're interested in reading? Have I carved out a time in the day where everybody is reading? And so then instead of me pushing, now I'm removing obstacles that would prevent kids from reading in that example, and creating an environment that makes it much more likely that kids are gonna enjoy it and wanna keep doing it in an intrinsic fashion, rather than trying to monitor extrinsically. 0:44:11.0 AS: So let's wrap up by talking about what you've been working on, you've been working, you've been writing and maybe you can share where you're at and what you're producing. And then after that, I think we'll highlight to the audience what we're gonna do in the future episodes. So maybe tell us about what you're working on and kind of where that's at, and then why you're doing it, and what's the value that you think it can bring. 0:44:37.9 JD: Yeah, I'm actually, I'm writing a book on applying Deming's ideas to schools, it's sort of the tentative title is Win-Win, W. Edwards Deming the System of Profound Knowledge in the Science of Improving Schools. So I've actually found a publisher, I've completed a draft and submitted it to them, and so we're working right now on getting the book published. And so I'm hopping by the end of the school year that'll be out and published and available for folks, so that's the big thing I've been working on, I actually started in September of 2020. So it's been quite the project to bring it from just an idea to an almost published project, so hopefully soon that'll be ready. 0:45:25.6 AS: Exciting, and I think that leads us into we're gonna... You and I are gonna have some conversations about that book and about the things that you're learning and teaching throughout that, and we'll have a series that we'll be going through, which I'm excited to learn from you. Ultimately I have businesses, and I apply Deming's thinking in business, but also I'm a teacher so I enjoy everything that I can learn from people like yourself and David, and I know the audience will learn. So let me ask one last question, and that is, why Deming? And why now? Why is it important that it's Deming and why is it important that we are looking at this now? 0:46:14.1 JD: That's a really good question, I would say I consider myself a learner, I read a lot, I watch a lot, I listen to a lot of podcasts, and across my 20 years I've never found anything quite like the Deming philosophy. You search for these magic or silver bullets and they really don't exist, but the Deming philosophy really has been that thing for me, because I think what I didn't realize is the importance of an underlying philosophy for then everything else that you're doing. And that foundation is what the System of Profound Knowledge has really provided to me in my work. And I also mentioned as I thought through the ideas pretty deeply, and wrote about those ideas in the book, every time I had some dissonance initially with the Deming idea and then I put it in my own life, I worked it out and said, "Yep no, that... He was exactly right. Have we thought about how we interact in our organizations, how we interact with each other." And so not that the dissonance has gone away, not that I understand all of the ideas perfectly, but every time I've tested it and tried to falsify the philosophy or the theory I haven't been able to do it. And there's nothing else that I can say that I've worked with that has held up to that scrutiny like this philosophy. 0:47:49.7 AS: Fantastic. Well, John, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for coming on the show, and I wonder, do you have any parting words for our audience? 0:48:00.1 JD: Yeah, I think one of my favorite Deming quotes is really short and to the point, he said, "I make no apologies for learning." And I think that's a really good way to end the conversation, and what he meant by that was, you might have not have been doing it right before, but there's this opportunity to learn this new way. And that's sort of the opportunity that I've taken as I've discovered Deming's work.\ 0:48:28.4 AS: And that concludes another great story from the worldwide Deming community, remember to go to Deming.org to continue your journey. This is your host Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with my favorite quote from Dr. Deming, and that is people are entitled to joy in work.

Are tests like the SAT - and a potential National Merit Scholarship that goes with a good score - the same as grading or ranking students? David and Andrew discuss the differences. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today, his topic is, The Difference Between Testing and Ranking Students. David, take it away. 0:00:29.4 David Langford: Okay, well, if you're an educator, that should be a trigger enough for you to pay attention and listen to this. [chuckle] So I wanna tie this in with Deming thinking and the difference and what people are trying to do with equity and all kinds of things that are going on today. And it's pretty relevant too, because I just watched a newscast that a school district was delaying or even not announcing their National Merit Scholars because of the fear that it would make other children feel bad because they weren't recognized like that. So it's kind of like what Dagwood set in the comics one time sounds like a good idea till you think about it. I wanted to discuss that today because over the last 40 years, I've run seminars and talked about Dr. Deming's focus of rating and ranking and grading, and he's just really against grading, and I pulled up a quote from The New Economics, he says, our educational system would be improved immeasurably by abolishment of grading. Okay. So there's a difference between grading and actually just testing. So let's just talk for a minute about the National Merit Scholarship Program. So I just read some stats on that, about one... Over one million students actually apply for a National Merit Scholarship each year, and only about 50,000 are selected, and how are those kids selected? 0:02:09.4 DL: Well, when you're a junior in high school, you take the SAT test, and if you have one of the 50,000 scores of the highest in the nation, then you could be named as a national merit scholar, and that could mean a lot of things. I mean, it could help you get scholarships to universities, it could really look good on your resume for the rest of your life, it could mean a lot of things. So is that the same thing that Deming talks about by grading and ranking people, and I would say no, because what really should be happening instead of thinking that by honoring or naming people that, or recognizing people that took this test and got one of the top 50,000 scores that that's gonna make other people feel bad, therefore we're not gonna announce that or we're not going to recognize that is not the same thing. When you're grading and ranking people, you actually have to grade them, grade their performance in order to rank them, and talking about Deming's concept of profound knowledge, the variation in that is huge, and the psychology in that is huge. I'm sure that almost every single person can relate to a classroom where they probably told somebody, I just, I don't think this teacher likes me. I don't know why but I just don't think they like me for some reason, and no matter how hard... 0:03:42.4 AS: And it's confirmed at the end of the semester when I get my grade. 0:03:46.9 DL: Yeah, no matter how hard I try or whatever, I just don't think they like me, and I know it's happened to me at times, and I just... Well, I just, I got choices that I could drop the class or I could just put up with it and go through with that. So psychological things like that could enter in and then all the social-economic stuff that we've got going on now could enter in and ethics could enter in, and all kinds of things could enter into someone giving someone a grade, like in a classroom and then ranking them against other students, right? That's a totally different thing. If I could give this, the school district and I'm not gonna name them 'cause I don't wanna get in trouble or anything. But if I could give this school district advice, what you should be trying to do is get as many students as possible into that level of National Merit ranking, because it's not limited, as far as I know, it's not limited that you can only have one per school or something. You could have as many as qualify, and that would show what an elite school you are actually, that you have more people qualifying for a national merit scholarships than any place else. And drive other people to think, Okay, if they can do that, I can do that, right. 0:05:11.1 AS: And can we... Can we go into that more detailed, just so we really break it down. To understand when someone, I guess, voluntarily as a student does with this National Merit Scholarship, goes into some sort of competition or measurement or something like that, that that's different from a school teacher and a school administrator observing the behaviors and actions of the students and then coming up with a ranking of that environment that they're living in every day. Explain how that's different. 0:05:43.4 DL: Yeah, just a test that they take and they all go in to the room, 300 kids go in a room and they take this test and whoever gets the best score qualifies. That's all there is to it. So you have no idea if they're a male, female, tall, short, skinny or not. None of that enters in, so there's no real psychology to it, you just go in and take the test and if you gotta... You get the score, you get that, you get to ranking or it's not really... It's not a ranking it's, you just achieve that level of being able to pass that test. 0:06:17.6 AS: And as a... Okay, so from a school perspective, I can see that, then the next question is, from a bigger picture society perspective, is that person now ranking themselves or is there some problem with that from a country perspective that people are entering a competition like that? 0:06:37.4 DL: Well, would I want to put in the hard work it takes? Because when I look at kids that achieve that level of performance, I see years and years, 10, 12 years, some cases of hard work of always working hard to be a top student, and they may or may not be ranked as the 4.0 students in their schools. That has nothing to do with that, but they may be really good at taking tests or they'd be really good at studying for this, or they may have family members that are super supportive, maybe you have two parents that are both college professors, right. Well, I would think that they would have more emphasis on a National Merit Scholarship and the importance of that and be communicating that throughout this child's entire life than a sharecroppers child in Georgia, that has nothing to do with the school system, except taking his kid to school every day, right? Those are totally different situations. 0:07:46.3 AS: And in that case, if that person, let's say that person's... Let's say a family has... This is the first kid to have a chance to go to university as an example, and if that family found out about this National Merit Scholarship and they told their son or daughter, Hey, why don't you set that as a goal to try to take that exam when you are 14, or 16, or 18? Is there a problem with that? 0:08:14.8 DL: No, I don't see any problem with that at all. You have a bar that you're setting, and if you get over this bar, then basically you win, but it has nothing to do with rating and ranking the individuals. 0:08:28.4 AS: And it's part of it that it's like a third party, a separate entity that you're going to. It's kind of a voluntary thing as opposed to a system that's imposed on the teachers and the students, and everybody in the school. 0:08:40.8 DL: Has nothing to do with your school, basically, you could be the best or worst schools in the world and either pass this test or not pass. And it's not about passing his test, it's who actually gets the best scores. One of the top 50,000 scores for you to be named this. 0:09:02.3 AS: And if we look at these teachers in that school that have decided and the administrators who have decided to do this action, let's just say that their intentions are good, in the one sense that, like we've talked about here, when a student does really well in assignment, the idea that you've talked about is, Hey, how did you do that? Why don't you explain that to the other students and share what you're doing and stuff. I suspect what they're afraid of is that it's glorifying these really elite students within the school, and that the other students don't, either don't get the opportunity or they feel less of themselves. The teachers are trying... Let's just assume that the teachers are trying to do something good, but they're maybe misdirected. What would be a better idea within the school? 0:09:56.6 DL: Well, I wouldn't refrain at all from recognizing those students and saying, Hey, these are the ones that took the test and are now National Merit Scholars and, I suppose there could be an over-glorification of that, that you could go overboard with that, but to those students that are actually taking that test, they obviously know what it means, right. And the recognition that could come with it, and that could be at their college scholarships that you're a National Merit Scholar and that, I could look really good going to a major university or something, and it could actually end up in dollar values. And I think that's what are the things that the parents were complaining about is by not naming these kids in a timely fashion, apparently they withheld the names of these kids, because they withheld the names of these kids, some of them would miss out on being able to put that on their scholarship applications to universities, or even if you're just going to go get a job, that would look good on a resume and things like that, but the difference to me is that's not a rating and ranking, it's simply a count data, right. 0:11:15.7 DL: Everybody takes the test and whoever got the top scores, then they get the recognition. So, I think is all there is to it. 0:11:23.8 AS: If we were to look at another parallel and just trying to understand how Deming thinks and this concept, let's take a wrestling team as an example, where there is a team score kind of thing and an individual performance as opposed to, let's say a football team where really it's a team performance. And let's say that the wrestling coach has worked hard with their team and they're doing really well, and they've got a couple of really strong wrestlers and they compete and they win the state championship, and two of their wrestlers win the best in their weight class or whatever that is. Should that be celebrated by the school as an accomplishment, or is that rating and ranking, how do we view something like that? 0:12:15.2 DL: No, of course, it should be celebrated and kids recognized, etcetera, because those things take a tremendous amount of hard work, I don't know if you've ever were a wrestler, but I did that once upon a time. 0:12:28.4 AS: I looked at it once and I thought, Yeah, I can't work. I'm not gonna work that hard on that 'cause that looks brutal. 0:12:35.1 DL: Yeah. So not only do you get your own personal score, but those scores are all added up as a team, and that team score is what determines if your team beat somebody else's team, or you become the state championship team, etcetera. But the schools that are really good at developing wrestlers, right, they don't think about just having one person who's state championship level, right. They're developing a whole deep program that year after year after year, they have a plethora of top wrestlers that are moving into that upper echelon and can work that through. And there's also a good example, when I was the first year band teacher, the school I was at the high school was really into wrestling, and so I asked the wresting teacher, I said, Would you like to have a pep band at the wrestling meet and first he thought it was kind of nuts and he says, why, you know, I don't know, he said, Let's try that. Let's see what that was like. So I got a bunch of volunteer kids and we get a whole drum core and everything, we choreographed this whole thing. So there was still like music going, announcing the wrestlers, there was music in between and then there were drum beats going on, everything. 0:13:55.6 DL: Well, we ended up wrestling against this school that they had hardly ever beat and we just clobbered them, because the psychology of what we created was this momentum of... 0:14:07.9 AS: Energy. 0:14:09.5 DL: Wow, we're invincible, and we're one of the top programs in the state, and so on, amd so forth. So I thought the wrestling coach was gonna kiss me afterwards, and so he really liked that, but I mean, that's really kind of a good example I think that you can manipulate these things to a large degree, psychologically, if you think about profound knowledge and the psychology behind things, you can manipulate things to get the data to show different things. Were these kids all the best wrestlers? Now, I'd say probably we intimidated the other wrestlers and in an equal environment, some place, our kids may have not been able to beat these other kids because of what went on. 0:14:57.2 DL: But the point is that you're trying to develop the depth of a system in a program, so that you continually have great wrestlers, not relying on the fact that once every 12 years, we just have some naturally gifted kid that comes in. I saw this when I was a teacher in Alaska, and we had this student as a junior in high school, and he could pick up a 50-gallon barrel of oil and pick it up and put it in the back of a pick-up, and that was his job, and he came to the school and the wrestling coach said, Well, how would you like to come out for the wrestling team? And he said, Well, I've never done that before Junior in high school. Well, he ended up being state champion two years in a row, and basically he didn't have near as much training or talent as anybody else, but if he ever got a hold of somebody, they were done because he would just like... 0:16:00.2 AS: He'd put 'em in the truck. 0:16:00.3 DL: And just force them to the ground. So to me that's... And that had nothing to do with our wrestling program or the development, or anything. It's just a kid that had grown up super talented, or super strong. To me, it's also sort of the basic same kind of thing we're talking about with this PSAT test and the National Merit Scholarship, etcetera, etcetera. Are you really recognizing who's the most brilliant or who's just really worked the hardest. There's probably an element of both from the neuro-science standpoint, there's development of all of those neural structures and everything else that enabled these kids, but I would also submit that probably some of those kids were just much better at photographic memories of remembering stuff and excelling. They're just born with that, and it just was much easier for her, them to get there, but that doesn't preclude other kids that really wanna work really hard at preparing for that test and really working for them, and that's a goal or an aim that they might have that they really wanna try to do that. 0:17:09.1 AS: I would love to wrap this up by just kind of circling back to what's the objective of school, what's the objective of a business, what is the function of an individual within that system, what is the function or the objective of the management of that system and of the individual? What are we trying to do so that we just go back to first principles to make sure that the listeners, the viewers are going back to those first principles to say, Let's make sure we're doing the right thing. So can you describe for, as simply as possible what you think.   0:17:45.7 DL: To wrap this up, I will give you two words that I learned from Deming that just became imprinted on me over the years, and that's artificial scarcity. So when you're creating an artificial scarcity of top marks or top performance or anything like that, then that's bad, that's gonna have a detrimental effect on people. And we've talked about valedictorians and all those kinds of things, those are... That's really an artificial scarcity, you're actually... That's why some of the school districts are grading kids to 1/1000 of a point, et cetera, because they got too many valedictorians. Well, that's just the opposite of what you should be thinking about. You should be thinking about, can we get more and more and more people to this level, the same thing that we're talking about with the wrestling program, can we have a program that's producing more and more and more better athletes and that's a true system and a program. And that's the same thing. So you always wanna watch out, it might create an artificial scarcity. I have five children, and the example is, would I ever rank my five children, and say, Who's the best or who's not? 0:19:06.4 DL: Well, anybody who knows anything about parenting would say, No, that'd be a very stupid thing to do. Right. It'd be very foolish to do that, and they all have different gifts, they all have different skills and gifts and the backgrounds, et cetera. 0:19:21.8 AS: I'm thinking about also natural scarcity, where let's say a family does not have the means to put all five of their kids through school, and they have to choose one and say, Look, we're gonna put everything behind, and everybody knows that Bobby is the one that we think can be successful with the money that we have for University as an example, which I would say it's more natural scarcity than artificial scarcity. 0:19:47.0 DL: Yeah, even that, to me, that's a concept that may have been true 60 years ago, it's not true today, every single kid that wants to go to, even if you don't have the scores to get into a certain school you wanted to get into, okay, go to a community college for two years. And in many States, the State pay for it and it's for free, so that's a level of trying to level the playing field that... So it's not just reliant on the rich that can get to that level. 0:20:18.9 AS: So let's go back and try to... I just wanna try to wrap up what you're saying about the goal is to try to... How do we get more people to this level? And what I'm thinking about is PDSA, what I'm thinking about is training, figuring out what's working, and then bringing that... 0:20:36.7 DL: Systems thinking, Psychology, understanding variation, it's Deming System of Profound knowledge is what you need to be applying, that your system gets better and better and better and better, so that virtually anybody that comes to your school, maybe they won't rise to that level of one of the top 50,000 in the country, but everybody is getting better and better and better, and what are we doing in the system that's preventing more and more kids to get to that level of performance, just's the way you wanna think about it. So you're not creating an artificial scarcity of people. 0:21:13.8 AS: I remember Elon Musk being quoted as saying something like, We need to launch more Rockets, when he was talking about how to get better at what they were doing with landing and reusing the rockets and all that, and I just think about in my case with my valuation masterclass Boot Camp, which is a purely online system focused on a very specific thing, it's voluntary where people are signing up, and so it's very different than, let's say a public school. But the point is, is that every time we launch, we have new things that we apply from what we learn in the prior one, and as I tell my students in the current valuation masterclass boot camp, number seven. If they'd studied at number five, it's a completely different course, and I'm just thinking about all the different iterations and we stick with the things that work, and then we build and add on the next thing, and that's ultimately, I guess the job of us inside of business, inside of school, inside any process is, how do we find what works. 0:22:14.2 DL: What you're trying to do is to create a system where people are gaining knowledge that's useful and applicable in the future. One of the quotes that Deming had was, Why would I rate and rank my students, how can I determine who amongst them is gonna be great in the future, so why would I wanna limit them now with a grade. It took me years to understand what that meant, but until you've actually seen hundreds of students move through and students in high school and stuff where you think, Oh, that kid's not gonna, they're never gonna amount to anything, and all of a sudden they're state senator or they're doing something 20 years from now that you have no idea. But maybe they had to overcome your rating and ranking in order to think that that was possible, or that they were capable of doing that kind of thing. 0:23:11.1 AS: Yeah. And I went back to my high school records and I found that my GPA in high school was 2.6, I was firmly in the middle of my ranking in my high school. I was getting high basically most of the time and doing other stuff, and I wasn't really paying attention, my parents weren't pushing me that hard, they were just like, Try your best and whatever, and they didn't wanna see me drop out, but I was definitely on that path, and I think most people thought I wouldn't succeed. But then my last semester of university, I had seven classes and six of them I got As, and the seventh one I took at another university and I got a B. And something switched in me and I overcame that rating and ranking, and the fire of learning was lit under me, and I think maybe we'll wrap it up by saying that part... The whole objective of what we're trying to do is develop systems and processes that really work to set children on fire with the excitement of learning and figuring things out and finding things out with the objective that they're gonna live a better life, they're gonna have more joy and more, they're gonna understand things around them, they're gonna be able to make an impact around them, and if we can do that, I would say we're doing a pretty darn good thing. Anything you would add to that? 0:24:32.9 DL: Yeah, well, it leads into... And maybe we can discuss this in a later podcast too about, I've worked with a lot of universities and stuff, and I'll meet with them and I'll hear phrases like, Oh, we're one of the most selective universities in the state or the nation, or whatever, and we turn out the best graduates. Well, just go to our random selection of students, have a bar that you want everybody to get to a certain level, and when they do, everybody's name goes into the hat, and you draw out however many slots you have open. Now, everybody would know how they're chosen and if you can take those randomly selected students and turn out the best graduates in the country, I would acknowledge that, yeah, you've got a tremendous school, but if all you're doing is selecting, going through a rigorous process to select the people that are gonna fit your program, you're probably not doing much of anything, and you're not really developing a system of greatness where virtually anybody that comes here is gonna become great. And I want to submit kind of to wrap this up that every teacher is going through that very same thing, because students are thrown into their classrooms, usually and just randomly... 0:25:55.9 DL: Random selection, right? So if you can develop a system by which, no matter who is thrown into my class, even kids with special needs, I'm able to move them to a level of performance that nobody else is able to get these kids to, the very same kids. And next year they go into another class and they're not able to achieve that. Right. I would say you probably have created a fantastic teaching system, that no matter who I get, I'm over time, I'm able to get them to a very high level of performance. And I think that's the same thing that this whole podcast is about, you should be thinking about getting everybody to that level, and what are we doing as a system that's standing in the way that's preventing people from getting to that level of performance. So you mentioned a company, right, you don't just want one great worker, right. You want everybody to be great, otherwise you don't have a system that's continually producing great products. 0:26:58.3 AS: Yeah. Well, David, 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 and listeners can learn more about David at langfordlearning.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, and it just never gets old. People are entitled to joy in work.

In this podcast, David P. Langford discusses the importance of individual transformation and the concept of critical mass for initiating transformation. He emphasizes the need for personal knowledge and support before getting others on board, and highlights how a small group of committed individuals can create significant change within an organization.