Episodios

  • Mapping the Process: Path to Improvement (Part 9)

    Mapping the Process: Path to Improvement (Part 9)
    Apr 14 2025
    How can we improve attendance when every school has a different process? In this episode, John Dues continues his exploration of Deming’s philosophy in action, focusing on chronic absenteeism. As part of their third PDSA cycle, John’s team shifts from individual interventions to process standardization—mapping how each of their four campuses handles attendance interventions. The surprising discovery? Each school follows a different process, revealing hidden variation and inefficiencies. By visualizing these systems, the team is not only grasping the current condition but also setting the stage for a reliable, scalable, and effective process. This methodical approach highlights how understanding systems and reducing variation are key to meaningful improvement. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.1 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. The topic for today is Mapping the Process. John, take it away. 0:00:26.7 John Dues: Hey Andrew. It's good to be back. Yeah. For the folks that have been following along for the past several episodes we've been working towards defining this problem more narrowly in terms of this chronic absenteeism issue we've been talking about. And for the last few episodes we've been talking about how the team didn't have enough information to write that precise problem statement. And we took a look at gathering additional information by running a couple PDSA cycles in those first two cycles that we've discussed so far. We know we had zeroed in on a handful of students and ran PDSAs with them and their families about their obstacles getting to school. And then we left off talking about how we were going to shift gears in PDSA cycle three. And instead we were going to focus on standardizing our process. So creating a process map for how we intervene with kids with our attendance teams across the network. So that's what the team is currently working on. But just as a sort of quick reminder to folks, and especially if you're watching, we have this model that we've been working through, this four step improvement model where you set the challenge or direction, grasp the current condition, establish your next target condition, and experiment to overcome obstacles. 0:01:48.1 John Dues: And then like we've talked about several times, we're doing this with the team and that includes people working in the system, people with the authority to change or work on the system, and then at least one person with significant knowledge of the System of Profound Knowledge, like an SOPK coach. And we've been using this model that's on the screen to sort of symbolize or I guess visualize what those four steps look like. You're sort of marching up this mountain towards this challenge or direction. And we've also talked about this long range goal that we've had and we've taken a look at some data where we have our chronic absenteeism rate mapped out over the last eight years or so. We have this long range goal. So this is the direction of the challenge where we're trying to take our chronic absenteeism from above 50% down to 5%. We have the data going back to the 2016/17 school year. Then we also talked about how there's this, not surprisingly, there's this sort of pre-pandemic level of chronic absenteeism, which was again too high. It's not where we wanted it, but we have this major shift up where we've seen this significant jump in chronic absenteeism since the pandemic hit. 0:03:15.0 John Dues: So in those four years, 2020/21, 21/22, 22/23 and 23/24 we were up in the 51, 52, even up into the close to the 60% range in chronic absenteeism at the height of the pandemic. So for PDSA cycle three, really doing two things. So, and we're going to talk about this in the episode today. If you remember back way at the start of this series, we looked at something I called a system flowchart. So we'll kind of revisit that and then we're going to take a look at two process maps that were created by two of our school teams to sort of map their current process. And then we'll walk through, sort of we'll take that, we'll walk through what the plan is for this PDSA cycle three. So let's start by looking back at this system flowchart. I'll sort of reorient you to this. So we have up on the, and this is the current state. So up on the top we have the target system which is attendance. And then we have this aim that is sort of a three part aim. 0:04:42.7 John Dues: We want to define strong attendance for students and staff, make sure everybody's on the same page. We want to ensure that students, families and staff have a shared understanding of what it means to have strong attendance. And then we are working on improving and creating systems that identify and remove ...
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    29 m
  • Getting Started with Quality as an Organizational Strategy: A Conversation with Cliff Norman and David Williams

    Getting Started with Quality as an Organizational Strategy: A Conversation with Cliff Norman and David Williams
    Apr 7 2025
    Why would any leader choose to take on a transformation that requires rethinking how they lead, how their organization functions, and how they learn? In this episode, we dive deeper with Cliff Norman and David Williams, co-authors of Quality as an Organizational Strategy, exploring Chapter 11: “Getting Started.” They share powerful stories, practical steps, and the deep-rooted challenges leaders face when shifting from conventional methods to building true learning organizations grounded in Dr. Deming’s philosophy. This conversation highlights why improvement cannot be delegated, why leadership transformation is essential, and how to begin the journey—with clarity, commitment, and courage. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.1 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today we are going to continue our conversation with Dave Williams and Cliff Norman about their book Quality as an Organizational Strategy. I found this book fascinating because I think it's addressing something where there's been a bit of a hole and that is how do we think about the strategy of our business? And so we already had our conversation in a prior episode about the overview of the book, but today we're going to be talking about specifically, now this is kind of funny because we're going to be talking about the back of the book and that is chapter 11, getting started. Dave, why don't you take it away? 0:00:53.3 Dave Williams: Well, thanks, Andrew. Thanks for having us back on the Deming podcast. So, as you mentioned, part of the way that the book is laid out is that it describes kind of the foundations that are behind quality as an organizational strategy and begins sort of with an introduction that explains a good bit about how Dr. Deming had this provocation of a need for leaders to transform the way that they approach leading organizations. And part of that was to move not just from process based improvement projects, but to start to think about major systems in the organization and to pursue quality as the overall strategy and create a continuous improvement organization or learning organization. And so the book lays some of the foundation behind the science of improvement or behind profound knowledge that underpin the thinking, walks through quality as an organizational strategy, as a method of five interdependent activities. Then at the end it comes back full circle to say, well, this is great, now you've learned about these theories and methods. But a natural question for any leader would be, how do I get started? And one of the first things that we talk about in that section actually is about why leaders would want to do this transformation. 0:02:30.9 Dave Williams: And this actually came from a conversation that Lloyd and Cliff and I had in 2020 where we were talking about getting on this journey of building the book. And we all kind of recognized that this was really, really hard work. And we were curious or we, we didn't have a good answer of what was our theory about why somebody would deviate from the way in which they work today and embark on a transformational change of the way that they approach leadership, the way that they approach organizations. And actually I ended up going on a journey of interviewing a whole host of leaders who had been influenced by Deming, who had been involved in improvement in healthcare, folks like Dr. Berwick and Paul Batalden and Brent James. I interviewed some folks in the UK and other places, like John Seddon, and asked them, oh and I should Blaine Godfrey, who had been the lead of the Durand Institute, and I posed the question, what causes somebody to want to embark on this change? And many people actually had a hard time articulating it. But the answer that emerged, or actually Blaine Godfrey was the one that kind of framed it the best, I think, for us, was a number of things. 0:03:57.7 Dave Williams: Sometimes it's something like a book like this comes out and people read it and it's interesting and new. Sometimes it's an event happens, a patient safety event or a major accident or something of which causes people to have to change or do something different. Sometimes it's a discouragement with a desire that you know you could do better, but you don't have methods or know how to. So there were a host of things that we listed, and those are some of a sample of them that might invite somebody to say, the way that we're working today is not getting us to the level that we want to. And now we want to embark on something different. And we might look to something like quality as an organizational strategy as a method for us to transform the way that we're working and build on the shoulders of Deming's philosophy and the science of improvement and do it differently. 0:04:56.0 Andrew Stotz: And when I look at the book, you guys are bringing together a lot of different stuff. It's not just a Deming ...
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    1 h y 4 m
  • Powerful Learning with PDSA: Path for Improvement Part 8

    Powerful Learning with PDSA: Path for Improvement Part 8
    Mar 24 2025
    It's time for PDSA (Plan-Do-Study-Act) Cycle 2 in John Dues' journey to reduce chronic absenteeism in his schools. His team is using PDSA to quickly test ideas and learn on a small scale. Find out what happened and how PDSA can be a powerful tool for learning. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of a new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. The topic for today is Powerful Learning with the PDSA Cycle, Part 2. John, take it away. 0:00:26.7 John Dues: It's good to be back, Andrew. Yeah, like you said, we, I think for the past three episodes or so, we've been working towards getting a better definition of our problem specific to this chronic absenteeism issue that we're working on this year. I don't know if you remember from last episode, but we have this team working and they've basically said we don't have enough information quite yet to write this precise problem statement. So we decided to gather information running the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle. And last time we focused on the first cycle. This episode, we're gonna focus on a subsequent PDSA cycle, sort of along those same lines. For folks that are watching and perhaps just joining for the first time, I'll kind of share my screen and do a little bit of a review so that everybody can see or know what we're talking about, even if they're just listening for the first time. So we've talked about this improvement model. We're working through this four step improvement model. So set the direction or challenge is the first step. Grasp the current condition is the second step. Third step is establish your next target condition and then fourth, experiment to overcome obstacles. 0:01:44.3 John Dues: And we're doing all this with a team, people working in the system. People have the authority to work on the system and someone with the System of Profound Knowledge knowledge. right. And so, you know, we've talked about setting that challenge or direction. And as we're grasping the current condition, we've actually decided to skip to step four and experiment a little bit so we can get a deeper understanding of this problem that we've been working on. And you'll remember probably as well, did the screen change for you so you can see the chart now? 0:02:21.8 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. 0:02:22.9 John Dues: Yeah. Great. So I thought it'd be helpful to show this again too. So this is our process behavior chart of the chronic absenteeism rates dating back to the 2016/'17 school year. So we have eight years of data in regards to this problem. And you'll remember when we talked about set the direction or the challenge, we wanna basically cut this chronic absenteeism rate we're seeing coming out of the pandemic by a lot. So we're hovering around this 50% chronic absenteeism rate. We wanna cut it to 5%. So that means, you know, 50% or more of our kids, or right around 50% of our kids are missing 10% or more of the school year. 0:03:06.2 John Dues: And this is a trend that we're seeing all over the United States right now. And the other thing that we talked about is when we looked at this process behavior chart, that it's basically like there's a pre-pandemic system of chronic absenteeism, and then there's a post-pandemic system of chronic absenteeism. So, you know, before the pandemic, the rates were too high, but nowhere near to where they are now. So, you know, prior to the pandemic, we were sort of hovering around the, you know, 20 to 30% of kids chronically absent. And then, you know, coming out of the pandemic, it's been more like that, that 50% number that we've, that we've talked about. 0:03:49.4 Andrew Stotz: And so to reiterate for the listeners or the viewers, this is the chronic absentee rate at your school, as opposed to nationwide, which I remember last time you talked about, it's about 30% nationwide, and pre-pandemic, it was about 16%. 0:04:06.5 John Dues: Yeah. Right around there. So, yeah, so I'm talking about the four schools that make up our school system in Columbus, Ohio. 0:04:15.8 Andrew Stotz: Yep. 0:04:16.6 John Dues: And, you know, we have a pretty high percent of our kids are economically disadvantaged. And so the rates in schools that have that demographic tend to be more like ours, in that 40, 50% range. And then, but all schools coming out of the pandemic had much higher rates than what they had pre pandemic. No matter your affluence levels. It's just, just like a lot of things the schools with the most kids living in poverty get hit the hardest when you have these problems, basically. So, yeah, yeah. So what we were, we were studying this problem, and, you know, we have some idea of what's causing our challenges, but we've started running these PDSA cycles to dig into that a little bit more, ...
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    27 m
  • Don’t Be Limited by Quality Management: Misunderstanding Quality (Part 13)

    Don’t Be Limited by Quality Management: Misunderstanding Quality (Part 13)
    Mar 10 2025
    How does "quality" apply in all areas of an organization? In this final episode of the Misunderstanding Quality series, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz discuss lessons from the first twelve episodes, and the big ah-ha moments that happen when we stop limiting our thinking. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.6 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 31 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. Today is episode 13 and the title is Quality Management: Don't be limited. Bill, take it away. 0:00:30.5 Bill Bellows: Hey, Andrew. So this is episode. What number did you say it was? 0:00:36.2 Andrew Stotz: 13. Lucky 13. 0:00:38.1 Bill Bellows: Lucky 13. So then for those who are concerned about the use of the number 13, this is episode 14. 0:00:51.0 Andrew Stotz: I thought you're gonna say episode 12A. 0:00:54.7 Bill Bellows: And for those who don't mind the number 13, this is episode 13. And as we talked earlier, if Dr. Deming was to title the episode it would be... It would not be "don't." It would be "do not", do not be limited. So at the start I wanted to go back to review the path we're on. We've been on episode one back in end of May, Quality, Back to the Start. All part of the Misunderstanding Quality series for The Deming Institute. Episode two, we got into the Eight Dimensions of Quality with David Garvin. One of those dimensions was acceptability. 0:01:49.8 Bill Bellows: Another was reliability. Another was I say dependability performance. Okay. And I think it's important in a series about misunderstanding quality to look at the work of David Garvin. Just realize I think it's fascinating to... You move out of the world of the American Society Quality and control charts and whatnot. And that's why I think Garvin's work paints a nice... Gives a nice perspective to not be limited. And then we got into in the third episode Acceptability and Desirability. Episode four, Pay Attention to Choices and the choice of differentiating acceptability which is I'll take anything which meets requirements, and desirability. 0:02:42.3 Bill Bellows: I want that little doggy in the window. Not any doggy in the window. And then we followed that with episode five, the Red Bead Experiment which for many is their first exposure to Dr. Deming's work. I know when I worked for the Deming Institute for a few years the Red Bead Experiment website was one of one of the most popular pages. I believe another one was the 14 Points for Management. And, personally, I've presented the Red Bead Experiment think just once, just once. And I'm going to be doing it at the 2025 at, let me back up, the Bryce Canyon Deming... The Bryce Canyon...Bryce Canyon Forum. I can't remember the name. It's a partnership between Southern Utah University and The Deming Institute, and we're doing it at Southern Utah University. And on one of those days, I'll be doing the Red Bead Experiment, which takes a lot of time and then studying to present it a few years ago I was getting all the videos that I could find of it, many of them on The Deming Institute web page and none of them have the entire data collection. 0:04:18.5 Bill Bellows: They kind of fast forward through six people putting the... drawing the beads each four times and when you're up on stage trying to do that, I had four people that's, you gotta do a lot of work to make it that exciting. But the reason I present it, I say I present it for a number of reasons. One is to do the classic "The red beads are not caused by the workers are taken separately. They're caused by the system which includes the workers. It's an understanding of variation and introduction to control charts" and all of that is as exposed by Dr. Deming is classic. 0:05:00.7 Bill Bellows: But, I'd like to take it one step further, which is to go back into that desirability thinking and look at the concept that we've talked about of going through the doorway and going past the achievement of zero defects, zero red beads, and realize that there's further opportunities for improvement when you start to look at variation in the white beads. And, that then takes into account how the beads are used. And that gets us into the realm of looking at quality as a system. Looking at quality with a systems view as opposed... That's good, that's good, that's good. With or without an appreciation on how the bead is used. So anyway, that was episode five. We explored that. Next we got into the differentiation of Category Thinking and Continuum Thinking. 0:05:55.5 Bill Bellows: And for those who haven't listened to it, maybe not in a while, the differentiation is category thinking. Putting things in categories such as red beads and white beads are the... It could be any categories, categories of fruit, categories ...
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    32 m
  • Do Specification Limits Limit Improvement? Misunderstanding Quality (Part 12)

    Do Specification Limits Limit Improvement? Misunderstanding Quality (Part 12)
    Mar 3 2025
    Are your specification limits holding you back from improving your products and services? Should you throw out specifications? What does Stephen Hawking have to do with it? In this episode, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz discuss specifications and variation. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.5 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 31 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. Today is episode 12, and the title is Do Specification Limits Limit Improvement. Bill, take it away. 0:00:31.4 Bill Bellows: Hey, Andrew. How's it going? All right. 0:00:33.8 Andrew Stotz: Great. Great to have you back and great to see you. For those that are just listening, you can watch the video on DemingNEXT. But for those listening, Bill looks handsome, full of energy, ready to go, and it's my 8:30 in the morning in Bangkok, Thailand. So let's rock Bill. 0:00:56.3 Bill Bellows: So. I spoke recently to one of the folks I'd met on LinkedIn that have listened to our podcast and took the offer to reach out and we now talk regularly. And I just wanna say I've gotta, before we get to some, the story behind the title, I wanted to share, a heads up. And if anyone would like a copy of this article that I wanna, take some excerpts from, then just reach out to me on LinkedIn and ask for a copy of the article. The article's entitled 'A Brief History of Quality,' and there's three parts. So it's about 10 pages overall, and it was published in 2015 in the Lean Management Journal, which I don't believe still exists. I was writing articles at the end once a month for this journal, I think based out of the UK. 0:02:04.3 Bill Bellows: I think there was a manufacturing magazine that still exists and had this as a special topic and my interest was bringing Dr. Deming's ideas, to the Lean community, which is why it was a Lean Management Journal, so the article was entitled 'Brief History Equality.' And so I wanna get to those topics, but when I was reading the article, reminding myself of it, I thought, oh, I'll just share this story online with Andrew and our audience. And so here I'm just gonna read the opening paragraph. It says, "several years ago, I had the opportunity to attend an hour-long lecture by Stephen Hawking," right? So the article was written in 2015. So the presentation by Hawking would've been maybe 2012, 2013. And back to the article, it says, "he, Hawking, returns to Pasadena every summer for a one-month retreat, a ritual he started in the 1970s, several thousand attendees sitting in both a lecture hall and outdoors on a lawn area complete with a giant screen were treated to an evening of reflection of the legendary Cambridge physicist." 0:03:14.3 Bill Bellows: And I'll just pause. I have friends who work at JPL and they got me seats, and they got me an inside seat in the balcony, front row of the balcony, but they had big screens outside. I mean, it was like a rock concert for Stephen Hawking, right? 0:03:34.3 Andrew Stotz: That's amazing. 0:03:34.9 Bill Bellows: Oh, it was so cool. Oh, it was so cool. So anyway, "his focus was my brief history offering us a glimpse of his life through a twist on his treatise, A Brief History of Time. His introspective presentation revealed his genius, his humility, his search for black holes, his passion for life, not to mention his dry sense of humor. It ended with questions from three Caltech students, the last of which came from a postdoc student, an inquiry Hawking had likely tackled many times before." 0:04:06.6 Bill Bellows: So realize he's answering the questions through a voice activated thing. And it appeared that the questions were, his answers were prerecorded, but they're still coming through a device that is a synthesized voice. But I get the impression that he knew the questions were coming, so we in the audience were hearing the questions for the first time. But he had already answered the questions. So anyway, it ended with questions. There was an undergraduate student, a graduate student, then a postdoc, and I said, "the last of which came from a postdoc student, an inquiry Hawking had likely tackled many times before. And the student relayed the story of an unnamed physicist who once compared himself to both Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein." So this unnamed physicist compared himself to Einstein and Newton each placed on a scale of 1 lowest to 10 highest. "With this context, Hawking was asked where he would rank himself." 0:05:22.0 Bill Bellows: So this physicist said, oh, you know, Andrew, I see myself as this. And so the guy relays the story, and he says to Hawking, so given this other physicist said this, where would you rank yourself? "Well, I do not recall the relative rankings posed in the query. I'll ...
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    42 m
  • Plan-Do-Study-Act: Path for Improvement (Part 7)

    Plan-Do-Study-Act: Path for Improvement (Part 7)
    Feb 24 2025
    Can you use Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) during the information-gathering phase of an improvement project? Yes! Join John Dues and host Andrew Stotz as they discuss how John's team used PDSA to learn more about chronic absenteeism, their surprising findings, and what they'll do next. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.8 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. The topic for today is powerful learning with the PDSA cycle. John, take it away. 0:00:25.5 John Dues: Yeah, Andrew. It's good to be back. For the past two episodes or so, we've been working towards defining the problem of our chronic absenteeism issue, of course, we have a problem with chronic absenteeism, but we're trying to narrow that down and get a more specific problem statement. Last time we talked about how our improvement team, basically, had come to the conclusion after a few weeks of study that we didn't have enough information to write that specific, precise problem statement. So what we decided to do, and we started looking at this last time, was we started to gather additional information through a Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle. So that's what we'll focus on today, is this first PDSA cycle, and I think it's good to know that you can use PDSAs to run an experiment to test a new idea, but you can also run a PDSA to gather more information. Those are both very worthwhile uses of the PDSA cycle. So I go to share my screen just so I have that model up so that people who can see it, for those that are viewing. Can you see that now? 0:01:33.8 Andrew Stotz: Coming up. Okay, we can see it. 0:01:36.6 John Dues: All right, great. So you remember, we've been working through this four-step process for those who are hopping in for the first time or as a review for those that have been following along. So we have these four steps: set the challenge or direction, grasp the current condition, establish your next target condition, and then an experiment to overcome obstacles. And remember, we've been working through this team, that's a combination of people working in the system, people who have the authority to actually change the system, and then the System of Profound Knowledge coach. So I think that's a pretty powerful combination of people, and that's our team here working on this chronic absenteeism problem. You also remember that we have this long-range goal that this challenge that is to improve our chronic absenteeism from right around 50% to down closer to 5%, and I don't know if you remember this, but a number of episodes ago, I showed you the data we had over time, and we just had three years of data. Since that time I showed you that first run chart, I've actually gone back and added chronic absenteeism rates for our schools going all the way back to the 2016 - '17 year, and I think it's worth it to just take another quick look at those rates over time in a process behavior chart. 0:03:00.2 Andrew Stotz: Exciting. 0:03:01.5 John Dues: So, yeah. This is our chart. So we add more days so why not display it in this way. So what this chart is, is again a process behavior chart, we have school years going back to the 2016-'17 school year, and then through last school year. And we have the blue dots displaying the chronic absenteeism rate for each of those school years across our school system, and then the green is... The green line is that central line, it's the average of all years, the red lines are those natural process limits that sort of tell us where we can expect our data to fall given that this is a predictable system. So you can see right off the bat, something that's pretty obvious is that the first four years of data are below that central line, and then the last four years of data are above that central line. And of course, it's not too hard to sort of recognize that the pandemic happened towards the end of the 2019-'20 school year, and then sort of... We were all remote heading into that 2021 school year, and then for a number of years after we were in remote or hybrid, and so you can see very clearly that while there was chronic absenteeism in our system prior to the pandemic, after the pandemic, it exploded and it has not subsided. 0:04:28.7 John Dues: So in a typical year prior to the pandemic, we were somewhere around that 25, about a quarter of the kids give or take, depending on the year, of the kids were chronically absent, and then after the pandemic, we can see it sort of... Or at the begining of the pandemic, explodes up and then has settled around this, right about 50% average. 0:04:51.1 Andrew Stotz: And the fact that it's remained at this much higher level of, let's say 50-55% tells you that there's like... It has had somewhat of a permanent impact, whereas some ...
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    29 m
  • To Improve Quality Don’t Measure Quality: Misunderstanding Quality (Part 11)

    To Improve Quality Don’t Measure Quality: Misunderstanding Quality (Part 11)
    Feb 18 2025
    In this episode of Misunderstanding Quality, host Andrew Stotz and Bill Bellows discuss what not to measure when it comes to quality. Bill offers some great examples to show how organizations get it wrong, and how to get it right. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, we're gonna have a lot of fun, who has spent 31 plus years now that it's 2025, helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities in the episode, today is episode 11, and the title is "To Improve Quality, Don't Measure Quality". Bill, take it away. 0:00:35.6 Bill Bellows: Thank you, Andrew. And, so the title of episode 10, came from chapter 10... Chapter 1 of The New Economics, and I used a quote from Dr. Deming, which was, "Are you in favor of the improvement of quality?" Which Dr. Deming says, "Are you in favor of the improvement of quality? We can have a national referendum, yes or no?" Everyone says yes. Then he says... Then he say, "We could have a secret ballot." And... But I... At the beginning of the podcast, I had said, "Are you in favor of quality?" And it's... No, it's, "Are you in favor of the improvement of quality?" And so today I wanna, in episode 11, share it with our listeners and viewers, more of the profound insights from Genichi Taguchi. But I think, what I was just thinking is saying, "Are you in favor of quality?" And I've used that quote, which now I now realize it's a misquote. It's not, "Are you in favor of quality?" It's "Are you in favor of improvement of quality?" But in seminars, what I've done is used the quote, the misquote, I would say Dr. Deming would ask, "Are you in favor of quality?" And he would say, "We're gonna have a secret ballot. Is everyone in favor of ballot?" In quality, everyone says yes. So I would go through that. 0:02:16.3 Bill Bellows: And then I would go to the next question, and I would say to the audience, I'd say, "Okay. Dr. Deming made reference to secret ballot. So I wanna do a secret ballot. I want you to close your eyes, and I'm gonna ask you a question, and if your answer is yes, raise your hand. But I want you to close your eyes when you raise your hand, 'cause I don't want you to raise your hand 'cause everybody else does. Okay, so close your eyes." And I say, "Are you in favor of teamwork?" And all the hands go up. [laughter] And it's not so much "Are you in favor of improvement of teamwork?" But it's the idea that, acceptability saying this part is acceptable, as we've shared in prior episodes, is the essence of looking at that part, my task, my effort in isolation. And what that has to do with teamwork, I question. Now, with a few of us at Rocketdyne years ago used to talk about, we would say, you give out a term paper assignment, the term paper must be between 10 and 20 pages long. And what happens? They're close to 10 pages. Then I would share, we'd tell Allison, our daughter, I'd say when she was in high school, "Be home by between 8:00 and 10 o'clock," and she shows up around 10 o'clock. 0:03:51.6 Bill Bellows: And I would show a distribution over there. Then I would say, "What about a machinist? The machinist is given a hole to machine. And what does machinist do is machine the hole on the low side, and then a machinist is machining the outer diameter of a shaft or a tube. And what does machinist do? Machines to the high side." And so I would show those four distributions either on the low side or the high side, and say, "What do they all have in common?" And people would say, "Each of those people's looking out for themself. They're focusing on their work in isolation." Then I would say, "So what do you call that in a non-Deming company or in a... " In the first podcast there is a, called it a Red Pen Company or a ME organization, or a Last Straw companies... What do you call that behavior where people look at the requirements and say, "What's best for me?" What do you call that? What do you call, people scratch their head? We say... You ready? "Teamwork." [laughter] 0:05:00.6 Bill Bellows: And everybody laughs. And then I turn to somebody in class and I say, "So Andrew, are you a team player?" And Andrew says, "Yes." And I say, "Andrew, if you machine the holes to the low side, are you a team player?" And you might say, "I'm not sure." And I would say, "Say yes." And you'd say, "Okay. I say yes." And I say, "Okay, Andrew, who's on your team?" And you say, "Me." "So, oh, you are a team player, man." 0:05:24.2 Andrew Stotz: I'm a team player. Team Andrew always wins. 0:05:28.2 Bill Bellows: Yeah. And I would say, so I say, "In a non-Deming company, everyone's a team player. All right. But who's on the team?" So I would say to people, "You'd be a fool not to be on your own team. The only question is, who else is ...
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    33 m
  • Diving Deeper into Defining the Problem: Path for Improvement Part 6

    Diving Deeper into Defining the Problem: Path for Improvement Part 6
    Feb 10 2025
    Join John Dues and Andrew Stotz as they go one step deeper into finding the precise problem you want to improve. Sometimes taking big actions means starting small. TRANSCRIPT Diving Deeper into Defining the Problem: Path for Improvement (Part 6) 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. And the topic for today is more on defining the problem. John, take it away. 0:00:23.5 John Dues: It's good to be back, Andrew. Yeah, so it's been a minute, but two episodes ago we just kind of refreshed. We discussed how helpful it is to make sure we see the system in which we work whenever we're starting an improvement project. And then in this last episode, we took the sort of next step and we started working towards defining a specific problem. And like you said, we're going to dive deeper into that topic today. For those that have been following along, you'll remember that we've been walking through this four step improvement model. Step one, set the challenge or direction. Two is grasp the current condition. Three is establish your target condition, and four, experiment to overcome obstacles. And then again, we've said repeatedly, we're doing all of these steps with this team that has three parts. 0:01:18.1 John Dues: The people working in the system, again, for us, that's teachers and students a lot of the time, and then those that have the authority to work on the system, that might be a principal, that might be a teacher depending on the project, maybe it's the superintendent, if it's the whole system. And then this System of Profound Knowledge coach is that third part that's often missing, at least in school improvement. So we have this nice model and this nice graphic. And then what we've also been sort of layering on top of that is this improvement process. 0:01:48.9 John Dues: So in each of these steps in the model, we have a number of steps that we're taking to be able to sort of achieve that. One of the things though, that sort of like a key organizing question in step one in the model is we asked where do we want to be in the long run, right? And so we're thinking through this longer range goal, typically in the timeframe of something like six months to three years. And if we achieve this, it's really going to differentiate us from other schools in our case or maybe businesses or hospitals or whatever it may be. And we've also sort of said that this is a stretch goal and it's at the outset we don't know how to achieve it. It almost seems impossible. 0:02:31.8 John Dues: And so for us, the key thing we're working on at United Schools here in Columbus is that we've have this really high chronic absenteeism rate coming out of the pandemic, and we have a goal to get that down much lower. So right now, about 50% of our kids are chronically absent. And I think I've said this before, we're trying to get that down to closer to something like 5%. So it's a pretty, pretty weighty problem and a pretty, very ambitious goal, I would say. 0:03:04.3 Andrew Stotz: Yep. 0:03:06.7 John Dues: So last time, what we said was, at this stage in the process, we've stepped back, we looked at some tools that help us see the system, and now we're doing that same thing for defining the problem. And we talked about there's some really useful questions to ask at this stage. The first one that we talked about as a group is how is the project being funneled from a general to more specific problem? We start with this sort of broad problem about chronic absenteeism, and we're trying to narrow the specific problem that we're going to work on. And then once we have that narrower view, we'll get all the way down and answer the question, what is the precise problem statement? And that's kind of our focus for today. 0:03:57.8 John Dues: Now, we won't get to the precise problem statement today, but we're trying to figure out the things that we need to do to get there. So last episode, I reviewed a tool we use at this step in the process called a Problem Statement Readiness Check. So we wrote this problem focus area, and this is really important. I've repeated this like, we use these tools because it helps us organize the group's thoughts and put it into writing. And that's really, really powerful. So we wrote this problem focus area, this sort of broader sort of characterization of the problem as we see it. 0:04:34.4 John Dues: And then we just listed out, what have we learned so far? What insights have we gained? And then we also listed a number of questions that still needed to be answered. And then we basically, as a group, we have this improvement team that meets weekly on Friday mornings. Then we filtered all that learning through six questions. ...
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    24 m
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