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What do you fix first when everything seems to need attention? Caroline faced that question while helping former students navigate life beyond United Schools. She wanted to jump in and start fixing everything, but she took a surprising step instead. In this episode, John Dues shares how a simple Post-it exercise helped them clarify what was affecting much of her department's work and gave Caroline a direction for her energy. Along the way, he and host Andrew Stotz get into "solutionitis," the danger of seeing too much, and why tempting solutions can lead us astray.   If you've ever felt the pull to just do something, this one is for you.   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. Now, the topic for today is See Before You Solve, and it gets to a tension that I think we all face and leaders face. We know something needs to improve and our instinct is to immediately start figuring out what to do about it. Like, "Do something, don't just stand there." And John, before we turn on the recorder, you mentioned something about the alumni services department at United Schools and what you were doing with it and what was happening a few years ago. Maybe you can kick off with that.   0:01:00.2 John Dues: Yeah, I thought, well, it's good to be back, Andrew. And I thought it'd be interesting... This has come up and in my work, and kind of, applying some of these Deming ideas. The Deming philosophy to something real life sometimes can help kind of bring it alive. So I thought this could be an interesting topic for this episode. And for folks that... We haven't mentioned United Schools in a while, but that's where I work. It's a K-8 system. It's a bit unique in that our relationship with our students doesn't end after that eighth grade year. We don't have a high school in our system right now. And so what we do have, kind of the next best thing, is this alumni services department that serves those eighth graders once they leave our program and then go on to high school. And they not only follow them... The folks in that department... They don't just follow them into high school, but beyond too.   0:01:55.8 John Dues: So once they get through high school and they help them sort of navigate that, then whatever it is they do next, whether that's college or military, trade, or a career, we continue to provide follow-on services. And that department has a director that I work with on a regular basis. Her name's Caroline Durbin, and she was kind of a high school counselor and then came to work for us about seven years ago and has kind of built this department from scratch. And so she... Lots of things kind of went off the rails during the pandemic in schools. And kind of, along those lines, she's thinking about, as we're kind of, turning a corner a few years ago from that pandemic time, or at least the heart of it, she knew that her department needed to improve too. And I think the thing that she was struggling with, though, was where does she start? There's no shortage of possibilities when you run a department like that.   0:02:58.3 John Dues: She was thinking about things like, how do you increase alumni engagement? How do you get kids, once they leave us, to enroll in those services? How do you deal with information about alumni that's incomplete? And there were some other pain points too. Any one of these things could have become its own improvement project. And I think that's a situation that a lot of leaders face. It's like, you know things aren't working as well as they should. You see five or [chuckle] even 10 legitimate problems that you could tackle, and the natural reaction is then, "Okay, which one of these are we going to fix? Where do we start?" That's the kind of thing.   0:03:42.0 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And before we get to where you're going to start, I want to tip my hat to Caroline and also to my counselor from high school, Fred Zigler. Fred helped a lot of us at a very challenging time in our lives. And I was thinking about this idea of alumni services for you guys. Like, "Oh, just let them go, kids go." But really, the relationships that we build are so critical. And Fred helped me address alcohol and drug addiction and get me into treatment, talked with my parents, helped me. And to this day. Now, that was 1982 when he helped me, and to this day, I'm still in touch with him and still see the value that he brought to my life at that moment. So just tipping my hat there. So, John.   0:04:29.9 John Dues: Yeah, that's incredible. In fact, Caroline, just this week, one of the things they do is they take our alumni once they get into high school, they take them on college visits. So they just went to Kent State and Xavier, two different groups this week, and she led them on those college visits. Pretty cool stuff.   0:04:46.5 Andrew Stotz: I imagine the Kent State campus has changed a lot since I was there studying, but yeah, just a good memory right there. So tell us, where did you start?   0:04:57.8 John Dues: Yeah, I mean, I think that's a great question. What we did was we didn't just pick one of those problems and immediately get to work. The first thing that we did together was just sort of slow things down a bit and really what we were trying to do is just kind of step back and start by trying to better understand what was happening. And so basically, we just literally took the various pain points that Caroline brainstormed, the different things she was seeing in her department. We just literally wrote each one on a Post-it note. Then we took the Post-it notes and kind of grouped them into common themes. And then we basically looked at how each of those themes was impacting the others. And over time, we basically used this exercise to see which one had the most arrows pointing away from it, meaning it was causing other problems. And the thing that came out on top was unknown alumni data.   0:06:09.8 John Dues: So basically, what was happening was that we didn't always have or completely capture students' data as they were leaving us or, over time, things would change. They would change high schools or change programs or whatever. And so we had all this incomplete information about our alumni. And that really was impacting Caroline's ability to understand other parts of the department's work. I mean, it made it hard to know how former students were doing, where did they need support, and it also made it hard to understand where our efforts were actually making a difference. So that gave Caroline a place to start.   0:06:51.5 Andrew Stotz: So she knew she had problems before you did the exercise. So what changed?   0:06:58.8 John Dues: Yeah, I mean, I think she didn't necessarily have more information, but she just had this better way of seeing the information that she already had, frankly. And that's an important distinction. Caroline knew something needed to improve, but she didn't start by choosing a solution. She started by literally stepping back and seeing her alumni system.   0:07:27.0 Andrew Stotz: And I guess this is probably pretty hard for all of us in leadership in that we get caught up in what we're doing and then we kind of narrow our focus, I'm thinking. So we tend to jump from seeing a problem directly to just trying to say, "Let's fix this. Do something."   0:07:45.2 John Dues: Yeah. And I think, that's what we're paid to do as leaders. We're paid to solve problems. And I think it's natural that when something isn't working, we turn our attention toward some type of action because that feels good. What are we going to change? Who's going to do it? How quickly can we get started? And I don't think that bias towards action is inherently bad because organizations, you don't improve your organization by endlessly discussing your problems or admiring your problems. Eventually, you have to act. But I think knowing that a system needs to improve, it's not the same as knowing where to begin. And I think that's really where leaders can get into trouble. This disappointing result appears and then immediately plausible solutions start coming to mind. This happens all the time. Your reading scores are low, adopt a new curriculum. Your team has communication problems, let's add another meeting to the calendar. A department's having trouble keeping track of its work, let's buy a new technology platform. And sometimes those things can be useful, but I think that the key thing is that seeing a problem isn't the same as understanding what's producing that underlying problem.   0:09:13.1 Andrew Stotz: And I think you use the term solutionitis. [laughter] What…tell us about that?   0:09:20.7 John Dues: Yeah, I mean, I like a lot of these ideas. I can't take credit. I'm sure I came across it in a book. I think maybe Learning to Improve, Tony Bryk's book, is maybe where I originally saw that. But basically, solutionitis is this tendency to prescribe changes before we've adequately understood what's happening. So the thing is we make this leap almost immediately from "something isn't working" to "here's what we should do about it." And I think the real problem is when that solution comes before an adequate diagnosis. And one of the dangers there is that then the most visible problem or maybe the most frustrating problem, it isn't necessarily always the best place to focus improvement or where to start, 'cause problems rarely exist in isolation. They're part of a system, and it's the relationship among those parts that can be just as important as the individual problems themselves. And I think that's really what that Post-it exercise, a very simple Post-it exercise with Caroline, it helpe

What if the way you measure performance is actually making your organization worse? Balaji Reddie and Andrew Stotz dig into Points 7 through 9 of Deming's 14 Points: leadership as a Socratic act of asking rather than answering, why 'drive out fear' is really about removing the fear of telling the truth, and how breaking down departmental silos sometimes means one team taking a loss for the good of the whole. Along the way: KPIs, internal competition, and why they so often undermine the system they're meant to improve. The episode closes with Dr. Deming's own words: leadership carries a responsibility to make a difference. 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 Balaji Reddie, an educator and trainer in the teachings of Dr. Deming and quality management more broadly. Balaji, how are you?   0:00:17.3 Balaji Reddie: Oh, I'm fine this morning. How are you, Andrew?   0:00:19.8 Andrew Stotz: I'm excited. Last time we talked, we talked about points four, five, and six. We packed a lot into that one.   0:00:25.5 Balaji Reddie: Oh, yeah.   0:00:25.8 Andrew Stotz: I'm interested in what we'll get through today.   0:00:28.9 Balaji Reddie: Yeah, right. And as we logged off the last time, of course, I had a hard stop to be made because I had another engagement at the end of the hour that we had. But it occurred to me later on that I should have mentioned something more. So I thought I'll just do a quick recap about what we did the last time we met, and then we proceed from there on.   0:00:54.4 Andrew Stotz: Oh, that's neat.   0:00:54.8 Balaji Reddie: Best part about doing this is there is no time limit, right? So we're taking it easy to finish whatever we have. But here we go. So points number four, five, and six is what we discussed the last time. And point number four, working very closely with your suppliers, don't go for the cheapest, go for the best, and calculate life cycle cost and things like that. So, I should have mentioned a particular person at that time. This was the lady who was working on behalf of MIT CAES, Center for Advanced Engineering Study, they are the people who originally published Out of the Crisis and The New Economics. And if you know, The New Economics second edition came out in '94, March '94, after Dr. Deming had passed away. And that's when in my early days in the Deming world, and I was when the internet came in and I was sending out emails to people I knew, might've seen... Whose pictures I saw on the net, including Henry. Henry was... We started a correspondence first by what you call snail mail, if I may call it. And then when the internet came a year after we were corresponding, that's when we started corresponding on email. And that too, he was not very conversant with it initially. He had a secretary, and so she would send me the mail and I would send her the mail, and then... It was on her ID. And then slowly she, I think, left the British Deming Association, and then Henry was all on his own. And that's when email, then one after the other started sending. So I needed to cite some portions of the book, and then I got in touch with the Deming Institute, and Dave Nave used to look into the emails in those days. Dave Nave and, bless his soul, Bill Ratcliff, if you know, Dr. Deming's son-in-law. So, they guided me. They said that you need to speak to Elizabeth Dorenzo, the lady who edited the second edition of The New Economics, which came out in March '94. So...   0:03:10.7 Andrew Stotz: It's the one I have right here, second edition.   0:03:13.5 Balaji Reddie: Yeah. That's the one. Yeah. It had a different cover, by the way, but this is an, I think, the 2000 print. This is a 2000 print.   0:03:22.1 Andrew Stotz: Right.   0:03:22.9 Balaji Reddie: Yeah, they changed the cover in the year 2000. In 1994 to 2000, the cover was quite different. I have that. I don't have it with me right now. But she told me something very interesting. First of all, she said she was expecting twins at that time. And the joke was, what will come out first, the book or the twins?   [laughter]   0:03:46.7 Balaji Reddie: Because she was racing against the clock and trying to get that book published. And the one point she said that he kept working on, because she kept getting notes from Joyce and Cecelia Kilian, his secretary, typed out notes, handwritten notes, which he wanted to be put into the book, was on point number four. So he was working on that till the day he passed away, about different worlds, different scenarios of working with suppliers, especially the point which we spoke of, work towards a single source. And he said it cannot happen overnight. However, he said in certain scenarios, if all of them are offering the same quality, then you'd be a fool not to go for the cheapest among those, right? And he was giving his... Trying to be... So there were many... There's World 1, World 2. So if you have the book The New Economics, these appear in the appendix: World 1, World 2, World 3, World 4, et cetera. And later on I found that he also gave them these as handouts during his four days... The four worlds in which you work with your suppliers and so on and so forth. So, being very, very practical in the application of what he meant. So that was one. And point number five, of course, we spoke about that you need to constantly improve. But he also cautioned what he meant by improvement, because he said here that improvement is of course taking the performance to another level, but these were in a different sense. He said when people come to you with problems. And remember, a problem is something that you did not anticipate that could happen. So, be welcoming of problems, and you need to look at it as a ways and means of understanding your process better. So the spirit was more of that. That was point number five.   0:05:37.0 Balaji Reddie: And then point number six we looked at, training should be reconstructed from ground up. And he meant in both ways, training on the job and off the job training. But the main thing is, he said that you need to help a person as a part of the training understand how they're contributing to the entire system. Because when a person knows why, they always perform the job better. I think he gave some examples of what that meant. So that was the point number six. Now we get to point number seven, which gets really interesting. So let me just pull up what he had to say in the text of point number seven. So here we go. Right, this is four, five, six, and now we come to seven. Now he says here, "Adopt and institute leadership." And interestingly, in the mimeographed book, the word was "supervision." And then he replaced it. In fact, I have that copy of that book where his handwriting is there, he's scratched out "supervision" and written "leadership." So he had it in mind. The 1982 edition of the 14 points, he wrote "supervision" there. But let's understand why he wrote that word, because I saw that word even in Dr. Juran's book, the 1964 edition of his book called 'Managerial Breakthrough.' And both he and Deming came from the same era, right? And so obviously their understanding of the word "supervisor" was a person with "super vision." In other words, the person who would see things that the people inside the process or system could not see. He actually meant manager, leader, call it what you will, right?   0:07:31.1 Andrew Stotz: Right.   0:07:31.3 Balaji Reddie: And so later on, I think it was Bill Latzko who told Deming to use the word "leadership." And so in the 1986 edition, in Out of the Crisis, he brought in "Adopt and institute leadership." And he said the aim of leadership should be to help people and machines do a better job. And he elaborated this a bit more in the 1990 edition, saying, "Adopt and institute leadership for the management of people, recognizing their different abilities, capabilities, and aspirations." And then he adds, "The aim of leadership should be to help people, machines, and gadgets do a better job. Leadership of management is in need of overhaul, as well as leadership of production workers." So that's what he wrote in 1990. Then he says here, "Transformation in any organization will take place under a leader." Now, this is profound knowledge, when he reworded it. And we started with this, and that's why when we started this series, this podcast series, I started with 14 principles of leadership, if you remember.   0:08:33.8 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. We're back to leadership.   0:08:37.6 Balaji Reddie: Yeah. So what I had to say actually for point number seven is in that podcast, because he actually elaborated 14 principles of leadership as an elaboration of this point. And he says here, "The transformation in any organization will take place under a leader. It will not be spontaneous. How may he accomplish transformation? First, he has a theory. He understands why the transformation would bring gains to his organization and to all the people that his organization deal with. Second, he feels compelled to accomplish the transformation as an obligation to himself and to his organization. Third, he is a practical man. He has a plan step-by-step, and he can explain it in simple terms. But what is in his own head is not enough. He must convince and change enough people in power to make it happen. He possesses persuasive power. He understands people." So, in other words, profound knowledge. You saw people, you saw theory, right? And of course, the variation in the sense that when you're making this transformation, don't expect the system to behave in a predictable manner. Sometimes it'll behave unpredictably. So if you understand that and you know what to do in such circumstances, you need to be prepared. And when you get prepared, you can manage. As he u

What if your AI strategy is creating more risk than progress? John Willis joins Andrew Stotz to trace how Deming's System of Profound Knowledge shaped the way he thinks about organizations, learning, and change. From his early days building DevOps to the AI transformations he's navigating with CIOs today. Along the way, John connects Deming to fast feedback loops, explains why leaders keep mistaking a learning problem for a technology problem, and shares stories that never made it into his book, Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge.   A fresh conversation for longtime Deming thinkers and those just beginning the journey.   TRANSCRIPT 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 here with featured guest, John Willis. John, how are you doing?   0:00:15.7 John Willis: Great, Andrew. I was just thinking, I feel like that song, like I got my picture on the cover of Rolling Stone. Like, I'm on the Deming Institute podcast. Yay.   [laughter]   0:00:24.9 Andrew Stotz: We finally got you on.   0:00:27.8 John Willis: Yeah, yeah.   0:00:30.3 Andrew Stotz: Actually been a while and I wanna introduce you just briefly and then I'll let you do a little bit more of the introduction. But basically on Amazon, a book popped up and I was just looking at the date of that. That book popped up on, for me, it popped up on September 6, 2023 on Audible and I immediately bought it and I got the Audible book and the book's called 'Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge. How Deming Helped Win a War, Altered the Face of Industry, and Holds the Key to Our Future'. And I immediately got it. Didn't know you, listened to it, loved it. Later you reached out on LinkedIn and we started communicating and you were kind enough to send a copy of it, which I then went through in more detail. I love the book. I really highly recommend the Audible version because it's just fun. Because the book is opening up a whole new Deming lens, a whole new way from somebody that never met Deming, and I just found that fascinating. So maybe why don't you take a moment and introduce yourself to the audience so that people know who you are, where you've been, what you've been doing and what you're doing now?   0:01:41.4 John Willis: Yeah, no, no, great. I... So, yeah, I... I've been doing technology, usually high consequence business, regulated industry, banks, retail, the biggest of the bigs, where the technology is incredibly important. Right? And I've been doing five decades of basic technology transformations, and I'm kind of the person who gets bored real easy. So I've literally gone through, like, you name it, mainframe, centralized computing, client server, distributed computing, priority systems, the Linux Open systems, you know, owned infrastructure cloud, and I'm consider one of the founders of the DevOps movement. And now today, like the cliché that I am, I've been doing a lot of organizational strategy on AI. So I don't come in and tell you how to turn 4,000 developers into AI coders. I kind of tell your CIOs to slow down. Wait a minute. So, yeah, so my day job today is I'm... I think these days finally in my life I would call myself an author first. I've written a number of books. The one you did, I had... My last book was a history of 100 history, 100 Year History of AI. And... But I'm an advisor, so I sort of... I take inbounds. I don't really look for work. Usually it's a chief of staff for a CIO who either has worked with me in the past and hey John, we're underwater with AI. Can you come in? Or they hear something I've said or I do a lot of podcasts and then I'm sort of a quasi investor. Although I probably should listen to your stuff a little better because I'm typically... I'm one of those guys that like, if I invest in it, you go short on it right away. So... [laughter] But yeah. But, yeah, no, so... But my day job today is really, is doing research. I'm actually just sure, this probably opened up a whole another discussion. Maybe later but I'm writing a book about the history of quantum computing right now and that's been just fascinating. So...   0:03:41.7 Andrew Stotz: Yeah.   0:03:41.8 John Willis: But my day job is helping CIOs and large high consequence organizations try to shuffle through technology transformations.   0:03:50.7 Andrew Stotz: And for the audience there that didn't catch what you were saying at the beginning, it kind of dated you because you were talking about the song called Rolling Stone by Dr. Hook.   0:03:59.9 John Willis: Yeah, yeah, totally.   0:04:01.3 Andrew Stotz: Dr. Hook published this in about 1972. And here are the lyrics. "Wanna see my picture on the cover? Wanna buy five copies for my mother? Wanna see my smiling face on the cover of Rolling Stone?" So here...   0:04:12.8 John Willis: Totally. Yeah. There you go. Deming Institute. Yeah, no, great.   0:04:16.7 Andrew Stotz: And one of the things that I found fascinating was just how you came to Deming from a very different angle. I was lucky enough that my boss at Pepsi sent me to study with him and I did two different seminars. The last one was in 1992. So I was 24, he was 92, was gonna live about one more year. I had... I could literally reach out and touch the man and hold his hand and sit next to him. I got a great picture of me sitting next to him. And I was just a young guy with a fresh mind compared to the 500 guys behind me that were older that he was bashing at times. But tell us a little bit about how you stumbled upon this topic and why you decided to do what you did with writing the book?   0:05:03.7 John Willis: Yeah, no, it's sort of interesting. I sort of say that for the first, I don't know, probably from 1980, my first job was running five distributed large computer systems for Exxon Research and Production, basically the geophysics work, right, during the most hottest period of the oil industry. And there were people doing that part of variation and understanding, but that didn't sort of hit my world. I was supporting geophysical processing and then so I rolled into other jobs. And then probably the closest I came... So in other words, I'm dealing with a lot of these major transformations and always focusing on the meta side, like the organizational. What are the things that are wrong? How do we fix the human and technology? There's a phrase called sociotechnical systems, right? And that's always where I've been most interested. And then even I was at GE Capital and I'll say this with all honesty, I was a Green Belt, but they gave out Green Belts for Six Sigma, [laughter] right? My wife was actually a Black Belt. And... But we would do... And I know Deming hated Six Sigma and all that, but we were doing... It was all around me, right? And then it wasn't until really the DevOps age that we really... That was a major shift in my career because before everything was sort of first generational from a technology or sociotechnical system, very command control, you sort of you installed software in a certain way. There were so many principles that were being broken by DevOps. And I was already an older guy at that point, but I was learning from these young kids and I'm known as the person who introduced DevOps to the US.   0:06:52.3 John Willis: And... But so there is where we started going back and understanding... We thought everything was new. We were creating DevOps, we were doing all this crazy awesome stuff. And I remember a friend of mine, well, a good friend of mine wrote a book called 'The Phoenix Project' by Gene Kim and it's a rewrite of Eliyahu Goldratt's 'The Goal'. And I was like, oh my God. And I read all of Goldratt's books and I was like, okay, this is the way, this is the way. I've seen a glimpse of some 30 or 40 year knowledge that I was missing. And then it was an open space seminar. A good friend of mine says, "John, you know." and I'm going off about Goldratt and he's like, "You know this all goes back to Deming." I'm like, "Who's Deming?" I'm like, "I just spent a year learning everything I could about Goldratt. He is my North Star. And now you're telling me..." And he challenged me. He said, "John, I'll leave it at this. You go read Deming's 14 Points and if you don't... I know you. I know what you're gonna do once you do that." And he was spot on. That was it. I was... And I don't... I'm more into the Profound Knowledge and we could talk a little bit about my journey there. But I was like, oh my goodness, this is the real and I love Eliyahu Goldratt and I love 'The Goal' and I love all his books. But Deming was hitting... Was like punching me right square in the face.   0:08:12.0 Andrew Stotz: So to what gap did it close for you? I mean, Goldratt is very specific about the main limiting point...   0:08:23.2 John Willis: Yeah.   0:08:23.3 Andrew Stotz: The bottleneck, how do we solve this?   0:08:25.6 John Willis: So the 14 Points, sort of one of the jokes is that it's mandatory to put the 14 Points in a DevOps presentation. So we were doing that dance a little bit, but then when I got a little serious about it, actually me and Gene Kim, we did a book. Goldratt has this book called 'Beyond the Goal'. It's an audio-only book, right? And I convinced Gene about five years after he had written 'The Phoenix Project' to do a Beyond the Phoenix Project. And so he did Goldratt, I did Deming. And at that point, I knew enough about Deming to say, "Okay let's..." And then we talked about DevOps and the principles of Lean and we did... I always, when somebody says they bought that audiobook, I'm like, "Oh, you're the 15th person that bought it." right? But it sold more than that. But the... But that's when Gene tapped me on the shoulder and did that. We went to the studio. It was a highlight of my life, literally going to the studio with Gene and literally recor

What if your cheapest supplier is secretly your riskiest? Balaji Reddie unpacks Deming's Points 4, 5, and 6 with Andrew Stotz by exploring Deming's thinking on suppliers, continual improvement, and training. Why do strong relationships matter more than short-term savings? Why should problems be welcomed? Do people perform differently when they understand the purpose behind their work? Balaji uses stories to offer a practical look at what these three points can teach leaders today. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.0 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussions with Balaji Reddie, an educator and trainer in the teachings of Dr. Deming and quality management more broadly. Well, we've had some great conversations so far on various points of Dr. Deming's 14 points. I think we're gonna try to get four or five, four, five, six. Let's see how it goes. So, Balaji, take it away.   0:00:32.5 Balaji Reddie: All right. So, good morning, Andrew. So I think the last couple of times we were together, we've spoken about point number one. I think the first thing I did say is that this is an entire system, so we can't isolate them. But he gave it some sequence and he gave it some structure. So... Is there disturbances that getting recorded?   0:00:54.3 Andrew Stotz: No. No.   0:00:55.0 Balaji Reddie: No? Okay. Right. So point number one, of course, was very much in sync with how he defined a system, where he said that every system must have an aim. Without an aim, there is no system. And when you read the commentary behind that, you see that it's not just aim what he meant was also purpose, the reason why a system exists. And so when we started seeing how he applied this to the running of an organization, that's why the first thing that crossed his mind was purpose. We, of course, discussed that in complete detail, what he meant by that. I think we also discussed about the actual text that he wrote where he said for quality and productivity and things like that. The second one, of course, how he changed the wording of point two, which was adopt the new philosophy. So when he first wrote it, it was philosophy of quality that comes first more than anything else. But when he professed Profound Knowledge, the wording changed to the new philosophy of win-win, right? Cooperate.   0:01:54.4 Balaji Reddie: And that's what we discussed last time, that cooperation in the broadest sense of the term with each other inside the company, with your competitors, with your suppliers, with your customers. And he says, "Teach and practice this." Those were the words. And the third one, of course, cease dependence on mass inspection. And it was a context in which he wrote it, but of course, he elaborated on that. You should understand why we use inspection. It is to keep us updated on what is happening in the process, not so much to sort bad from good. And that was basically, in fact, the wordings of the new point he wrote was understand the purpose of the system of inspection. He said there will always be inspection, but relying on that is not right. Using that to understand the process, that's the way to do it. So that's exactly what we spoke last time. Now we're taking it from there. Now talking about point number four, where... I'll just pull up the wordings for my sake so that I don't make a mistake in reading out what he actually said. Right? So the original wordings and then what it changed to later on, right? When he started professing. Now, so here's point number four, which goes like this. He says, "End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag alone. Instead, minimize total cost. Move toward a single supplier for any one item in a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust." And this did not change in 1986 or 1990.   0:03:39.1 Balaji Reddie: Now, he writes there in the commentary, which is taken from his text, "The aim in purchase of tools and other equipment should be to minimize the net cost per hour of life. Price has no meaning without a measure of quality being purchased. Without adequate measure of quality, business drifts to the lowest bidder, low quality and high cost being the inevitable result. Estimate the total cost of use of materials and services, the first cost, purchase price, plus the predicted cost of problems in use of them and their effect on the quality of final product. As the relationship between supplier and customer grows tighter and tighter, renewal of a contract year after year may appear to be a formality. This even tighter and tighter relationship will, under good management of producer and customer, ensure better and better quality and lower and lower costs as the years go by. A long-term relationship with a single supplier may be a wise decision if customer and supplier play their parts for optimization of the system. However, a sudden jump to a single supplier is inadvisable. There are risks. Go slow. It is not a relationship to enter into lightly. An overriding criterion is the supplier's burning desire to work with the customer on a long-term relationship backed up by a demonstrable store of specialized knowledge with management that is trying to adopt the new philosophy."   0:05:01.8 Balaji Reddie: And beautifully written. So the new wordings would now be, "Work towards having an arms-around relationship with your suppliers. Invest in them through education and training so that they can contribute effectively towards the organization. And when purchasing, do not focus on price alone without a measure of quality, and reduce variation by practicing cooperation with your suppliers." Now, coming to this, not many people are aware of what he spoke in Japan to the organizations there, but one of the major points he did say was to work very closely with their suppliers, right? And this text... The funny thing is, you know, about his works in Japan that he never gave any handouts or material, unlike Dr. Juran, who gave a lot of notes before he landed there. Right? Dr. Deming just handed out certain standards and just some pamphlets, I think Z1, Z2, and Z3, the standard copies. But what he spoke there was recorded by them. And the notebook, the book that came out, Elementary Principles of the Statistical Control of Quality, were essentially transcripts of what he spoke there. Right? It's later on when they showed him that they had made a book that he assisted. They expected him to get a little, I can't use a very strong word, upset, but that he would chide them for having done something without his knowledge. But instead, he was very happy, apparently, and added on to it and gave them the second edition and asked them to add an extra chapter and things like that. So when he went through those notes, obviously it was their translation of English to Japanese and then Japanese to English and things like that. But strong messages came out, and one of them was to work very closely with their suppliers and treat them as an extension of themselves, right? Extension of the company itself.   0:07:09.7 Balaji Reddie: Now, the thing about the lectures that he gave there, it's very interesting, that the arrow diagram, if you remember the famous arrow diagram which he drew there. If you see, it appears on Out of the Crisis in the new edition, page three, but the original edition, page four. But that arrow diagram in his mimeographed book, Quality, Productivity, and Competitive Position, comes on page number 103. And if you see the Elementary Principles of the Statistical Control of Quality, the arrow diagram is just directed towards the consumer. That does not have consumer research, right? And I think even he was... When he wrote... When the final edition of The World of W. Edwards Deming came out, the Lecture to Top Management, actually that was a lecture which he gave to the statisticians and engineers. To top management, there were two instances. One was July 1950 where he spoke to 20 people... Or 21 out of the 40 people who were invited. And then there was another one in August 1950. And August 1950, that took place at Hotel Diama, and that's where he added consumer research and completed the diagram. And that's the one he reproduced ever since in all his papers. But funnily, in The World of W. Edwards Deming, they've reproduced the first arrow diagram that he came up with, which did not have consumer research. It just shows the arrow pointing towards. But in both there, there was the presence of suppliers. Right? And he said that now... We used to have this group on the internet. It was called DEN, Deming Electronic Network, the D-E-N, the DEN, and we used to call ourselves the DENizens. And there was a gentleman, Jim Clauson, who used to... Who was a moderator and he had everything. It's unfortunate, I don't know where he is now. Not kept in touch with him. The last, I think, I interacted was many years ago.   0:09:16.7 Balaji Reddie: But all that... That's a treasure house of conversations, emails, which he has. Unfortunately, some cybersquatter hacked into the server and was asking for a ransom of $28,000 or something like that. And this guy didn't... He said, "Obviously, I can't pay that kind of money." So I don't know whether he's managed to retrieve all of that, because that's a treasure house. We used to have a lot of chats on that, and I interacted a lot with two very, very famous people who also worked very closely with Dr. Deming. One, of course, the great Myron Tribus, and the other one was John Dowd. And John Dowd... We had this chat and we said there is a difference between July 1950 and August 1950. And he took it on himself to find out what exactly was spoken in both these. Because July 1950, yes, Dr. Deming himself gave some notes and said, "This is what it needs to be." But August 1950, the people sitting there. So there were 80 people in that room. And I

If you've led an organization or a team for more than a few years, you've probably watched the same problems resurface again and again. Different initiatives. Different people. Same underlying issues.   In this episode, John Dues joins Andrew Stotz to dig into a puzzle Dr. Deming pointed to decades ago: "Experience without theory teaches nothing." John unpacks what Deming meant: experience doesn't come with its own explanation. It can answer a question, but only if you're asking one in the first place. Without a theory of why something works, all that hard-won experience just repeats itself. This episode is a great listen for anyone who has ever wondered why years of effort don't always add up to real improvement. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. The topic for today is why experience isn't enough, and it leads to a pretty interesting puzzle. If experience is such a great teacher, shouldn't businesses and schools and school districts just keep getting better over time? John, take it away.   0:00:42.7 John Dues: Yeah, thanks for having me back, Andrew. Yeah, I think that's exactly the question that got me thinking about this. When I think about my own experience as a school leader and people I've worked with over the years, once you've been, let's say, a principal for 10 or 15 years or a teacher or superintendent, you're a school leader or a teacher leader, you've probably observed hundreds or maybe even thousands of lessons. You've dealt with all kinds of issues, discipline problems, staffing challenges, parent concerns. You've seen curriculum come and go, state assessments change, new initiatives, budget decisions, all kinds of unexpected problems. And yet, I think organizations, complex organizations like schools, you can spend years wrestling with essentially the same challenges year after year, even as the initiatives change and people sometimes change and terminology changes, but a lot of times the underlying problems can remain really, really consistent. And so I started thinking, if experience naturally produces learning, why doesn't all of this experience that gets accumulated reliably produce better organizations? And then I was thinking about something that I read from Deming, who more than 30 years ago said... Probably more than 40 years ago said now, "Experience without theory teaches nothing."   0:02:24.0 Andrew Stotz: This one... That statement always kind of got me when I first heard it. Sometimes I listen to that, "Experience without theory teaches nothing." and think to myself, I know what that means. And sometimes I listen and I think, I don't really know what that means. And so it is kind of a provocative statement because I'm thinking about, well, how did I learn? Did I learn in my past? Are we talking about individual learning or are we talking about learning within an organization? And also, isn't experience the best teacher? So what do you think Dr. Deming meant?   0:03:02.2 John Dues: Yeah, it's like a lot of things I think that he talked about, you sort of have to stop and think. And even after you've thought about it once or twice, you can come back to it and kind of question yourself, "Did I really understand that?" You might have to go talk to somebody. But when I first read it, truth be told, as I was learning this stuff, I thought he had to be exaggerating. I thought the same thing: how could experience teach us nothing? I mean, obviously, like you were saying, we learn things from experience. But I think my interpretation is that Deming's point is subtler than that. I don't think he's saying, or he wasn't saying, that experience has no value. I think what he was saying is that experience doesn't come with its own explanation. Something happens in our classroom or our school and we observe it, but what does that experience mean? What should we conclude from it? What should we do differently next time? I don't think that experience can answer those questions by itself. And in 'Out of the Crisis', Deming wrote, "Experience will answer a question, and a question comes from theory." And I think that's really the key. I think experience becomes useful when we're using it to answer a question about how we think the world works. Again, in our classroom, our school, our school district, that type of thing.   0:04:27.7 Andrew Stotz: Imagine that you're a kid walking down the street and a pit bull comes running at you and bites you on the arm. It's not too serious. The owner manages to get them off you. There's an experience. And it's experience tied with an emotion, which means it's memorable. You'll never forget that. What could you learn from that? Can you learn from that? Does what you learn from that apply to other dogs? It just, it opens up a Pandora's box that I like to think about in that particular case.   0:05:11.8 John Dues: Well, and I think in a case like that, you go through an experience like that, you're definitely gonna have a theory the next time you run into a dog, what you're gonna do, right? Especially if it looks like a...   0:05:23.4 Andrew Stotz: Yeah.   0:05:23.5 John Dues: Yeah. For sure.   0:05:24.4 Andrew Stotz: And this word theory, most of the time we don't really use that in our daily life, but we have words like theory, hypothesis, guess, hunch. So what exactly do you think he's talking about when he says theory?   0:05:45.9 John Dues: Yeah, I think that that can be, for if you're not in academia, I think that that can maybe be one of the biggest barriers to understanding this idea. I think, kind of like what you're saying, when people hear the word theory, you often are imagining something academic or something abstract. But if you think about it, we're using theories constantly, no matter what our work is. And when I'm saying theory, I'm just talking about an explanation for how and why something works. So, really every decision I'm making as a leader rests on some theory. I'm thinking about, if I'm a principal and I decide that something like weekly classroom observations will improve instruction, there's a theory behind that decision. I'm saying really, by putting weekly classroom observations into my practice, I'm saying if we increase the frequency of classroom observations and feedback, then teaching will improve. Right? That's my theory. If a superintendent who's leading his district and they have some issues with reading and they purchase a new reading curriculum, there's a theory, if teachers use this curriculum, student reading outcomes will improve. And this could apply to any number of things. The leadership team of a school district changes the schedule, they restructure what staffing looks like across their schools. You add an intervention period to your school building, the state changes the teacher evaluation system, or the state launches an attendance initiative in response to this chronic absenteeism problem we've been seeing. Every one of these decisions reflects a theory about cause and effect, basically.   0:07:46.5 Andrew Stotz: And there's two things about theory that I like to do when I'm teaching. I like to ask a question that we could prove what the answer is. And let's just say, how many companies in the world have a strong level of profitability and growth relative to peers sustained over a five-year period? That's a very specific question and I have very clear definitions of all of that. And out of... Then I ask the audience, my students, out of 8,500 companies in the sample that I have, how many companies do you think have sustained this outperformance over five years? And then they make guesses as to what they think the answer is, and then I walk them through, here's how I tried to prove it. Now, you could argue that my... You'd define something differently or you'd do the test differently over three years or seven years. One student said, "Why not 10 years?" All of that. But in the end, I say, "Okay, my answer to that question is 400."   0:08:59.9 John Dues: Interesting.   0:09:01.0 Andrew Stotz: And so then that leads me to another step in the process. And what I'm trying to teach my students in Valuation Masterclass Bootcamp is the idea of how do you think like an analyst? An analyst says they come up with a theory or an idea, like, "I think some stock, stock ABC, is gonna double in the next six months." Okay, that's a theory, and you're gonna put money down on that theory. You may try... You need to try to support it with evidence and all that, and then in six months, if you didn't write it down, you'll probably forget it or you'll misremember it.   0:09:37.7 John Dues: Yep.   0:09:38.3 Andrew Stotz: So the question isn't really whether leaders have theories. I think we all have theories, and we're acting on these theories. So where do we go from there?   0:09:49.9 John Dues: Yeah, I think what you just said is exactly right. The question is, I think, whether those theories are explicit enough to examine. So you talked about writing it down, that's a common misstep. We don't write our theories down. I think most of our theories are implicit. We don't say, "Here's my theory about how this system works. Here's my theory about how this classroom works. Here's my theory about why weekly classroom observation will work to improve instruction." We just sort of act, and then something happens. Sometimes the results improve, sometimes they get worse, sometimes nothing really changes. Probably a lot of the time it's that. And then typically what we do is tell ourselves a story about why that outcome happened, whichever one it is, right? And that's, I think, where experience becomes particularly

What did Dr. Deming really mean when he said to "cease dependence on mass inspection"?    In this episode, Balaji Reddie and host Andrew Stotz unpack why one Ford manager's decision to fire his inspection team missed the point entirely. They explain how inspection can help leaders understand and improve the process, rather than simply sort good from bad.    They also explore why Deming's 14 Points must be understood as a system, including his evolving call for cooperation and win-win thinking among employees, customers, suppliers, and even competitors. Whether you are new to Deming or have studied his work for years, this conversation offers a sharper way to think about quality, systems, and improvement.   TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.0 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 Balaji Reddie, an educator and trainer in the teachings of Dr. Deming and quality management generally. Balaji, how are you doing today?   0:00:25.1 Balaji Reddie: Oh, I'm doing good. We're meeting after a small little gap, and in the interim I think a few things happened. One of the major things, I think you and I were really happy to see that Bill Scherkenbach sent us a lovely photo. So Bill, if you're listening to this, thank you so much, of course we thank you for the photo. We mentioned the last time or rather when we were speaking that I said that there used to be a group of people that used to meet over the weekend. I don't know what the actual protocol was, but all of the so-called core Deming people, you know, like Gipsie Ranney and Nida Backaitis, I hope I'm getting the names right, Barbara Lawton. And I remember Henry Neave saying he was a part of that. So I didn't see that in the photo. So, maybe one of the weekends he was there over in America and so he was there because he mentioned this. And so Bill very kindly said what it was christened. It was christened the Cosmos Club. And then he shared a photo. So Bill, thank you so much. And also helping us identify most of the people in that photograph. If sometime we could share it with the Deming Institute, if they could show it as part of the... If ever we convert this into some kind of video later on with some slides and things like that, they could add that in.   0:01:53.0 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, it's still wonderful.   0:01:53.7 Balaji Reddie: That was wonderful. Yes.   0:01:54.9 Andrew Stotz: It's a great picture. In fact, I'm gonna just make sure that I download it for today's episode.   0:02:00.9 Balaji Reddie: Yes, yes.   0:02:01.7 Andrew Stotz: Because I'll supply it to the Institute and ask Bill if we can use it. Let's see.   0:02:08.4 Balaji Reddie: Yeah, I mean, I presume that he would want us to ask, but he is very big-hearted. I think he wouldn't mind at all.   0:02:14.7 Andrew Stotz: He looks like a spring chicken in that picture. [laughter]   0:02:17.2 Balaji Reddie: Oh, yeah, all of them. There was Joyce Orsini too there. It was nice to see the whole jing-bang gang, as they call them, [laughter] the Cosmos Club. But wonderful. So, yes, so last time we were discussing point number one and we saw his interpretation in the broadest sense of constancy of purpose. I shared also what he was saying towards the end of his life that he said, "Create and publish the statement of the aims and purposes of the company or other organization." So he was envisioning that it's no longer one company. It's a family of companies working together. And so there has to be something that binds all these companies together because today's business is very complex. The family is actually globally dispersed. And so there has to be a common thread that links all of these organizations together and that has to be the statement of purpose. Why do we exist? Each could have their own, you know. Because that's what Deming said in the word interdependent components of a system. And interdependent means being independent and mutually dependent simultaneously. So independent does not mean isolated. It means autonomous, that means you go by yourself. You could have your own purpose, but you need to align it with the purpose of the companies you're actually contributing to, which is amazing. So he asks us to look at it that way. And he said that the purpose should be to impact people in the broadest sense of the term. And you, in fact, brought that up, that quality, and we saw what he meant by quality. And then I think we discussed the purpose of educational institutions, et cetera, et cetera. What should they be?   0:04:07.5 Balaji Reddie: So that was point one. Now we get to point two. And I'll start with the original wordings which he wrote in 1986. So let me just pull that up here. He says here that, "Adopt the new philosophy. We are in a new economic age." And then he very specifically states, "Western management must awaken to the challenge, must learn their responsibilities and take on leadership for change." Now, let's look at it both ways because in 1990 he reworded this completely. But let's get back to what he meant in 1986, the new philosophy. Now, what was the new philosophy? What did he mean then? Recently I heard, or I think I saw, Dr. Joseph DeFeo, that is the current CEO of Juran Institute, release a version of the 14 points, or rather saying that these were Dr. Deming's 14 points. And I saw what he wrote there about point number two, which was his interpretation. Now, when I look deep, actually, it looked more like Dr. Juran's interpretation of the 14 points. Incidentally, talking about Dr. Juran and the 14 points, it's no secret that Dr. Juran always said that Deming did not speak much about management, he spoke only about statistics, blah, blah, blah. But there was, if you know, part of the inner circle of Dr. Deming was Dr. Myron Tribus. And Myron Tribus, if you know, was a director at MIT for some time, right? And around the time Deming was there at the Center for Advanced Engineering Study. And when... He, of course, went and met Dr. Juran to speak to him about the 14 points, and then they had a discussion for half a day on the 14 points, and Dr. Juran agreed with every single one of them. He said, "Yeah." He said, "He's spot on." But then he said that he never spoke of management then, and so he stuck to his version that he taught statistics to the Japanese. Anyway, let's leave that aside.   0:06:19.0 Balaji Reddie: But when he spoke about point two, and that's what Juran's interpretation was, that the new philosophy was quality should be the basis for running a business. That was the new philosophy, right? And he said that top management, of course, Deming always said that top management should be involved because unless that happens, nothing happens inside the company. So the new philosophy, what now we interpret is what Dr. Deming was trying to say in 1986, was "quality is the basis for running an organization," right? And quality, again, what we discussed last time, in the broadest sense of the term, not just of a product or a process, but the way you conduct yourself as a business, as a people. So that was the new philosophy. And he said that you should take on leadership for change, and he aimed it at Western management at that point in time, right? So that was the 1986, and he goes on to explain that, saying that we are living with commonly accepted... Because he was trying to shock the Americans at that time, right? If you try to realize when they woke up to quality in the 1980s, primarily to be... I mean, to their credit, to the American businesses, that they were doing a lot of course correction. They realized that they had done things wrong for 20 years, and a lot of course correction started happening, and they started seeing benefits. So they started interpreting that as improvement when actually it was just a correction. And I think Deming wanted to bring in that shock treatment to them, and he said improvement is not enough, right? So at that point in time, that new philosophy was basically that, okay, you're doing it right, but it's not enough. And that's why it has to come from the top. So top people have to be involved. And that was how they interpreted this.   0:08:12.1 Balaji Reddie: And we also looked at it that way. But in 1990, he changed the wordings of the point two, and that was in light of what he had started professing, which was a System of Profound Knowledge. So I'll just read out what he wrote in 1990. He says now, "Adopt the new philosophy of cooperation and win-win, in which everybody wins. Put it into practice and teach it to your employees, your customers, your suppliers, and" why not "your competitors." So that was, I think, the new philosophy. Much of the stuff, if you start seeing, Andrew, when I look at all the 14 points, the 14 points have to be interpreted through the 14 points.   0:09:06.7 Andrew Stotz: Right.   0:09:07.8 Balaji Reddie: You need to understand the purpose of each point. You need to understand that they're a system. And that's why you can't just read them sentence by sentence and want to implement them, if you know what I'm trying to say here. They're a system by themselves. So you need to interpret them the right way and through the 14 points... I don't know if I'm making sense to you, but that's exactly how these are. He wanted it to be that way. So you can never tell that you've understood it completely. You're getting me? You're learning something new about it every single day. And as you start looking at things around you through the lens of Profound Knowledge, you will see things differently. And sometimes you see some gaps with the sentences that Dr. Deming was uttering, and then you say, "Okay, okay, this, this, this, I understood it now. I need to make this correction." Right? And so you can never say that I've completely understood them. I mean,

"Once you see it, you can't unsee it." What starts as a teacher's search to reduce conflict can become a lifelong journey in leadership and transformation. In this episode, Jake Rodgers shares how discovering Dr. Deming's philosophy changed the way he thinks about teaching, leadership, parenting, and work. From fifth-grade classrooms to leading The W. Edwards Deming Institute, Jake reflects on the lessons, challenges, and breakthroughs that shaped his path. Along the way, he explores why Deming's ideas still matter, how leaders can create more joy in work, and why understanding systems helps us make better decisions for people and organizations alike. A thoughtful conversation about learning, leadership, and what happens when you see the world through a different lens. 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 here with featured guest Jake Rodgers. Jake, are you ready to explain your Deming journey?   0:00:18.0 Jake Rodgers: Absolutely. Yeah. I'm so glad to be here.   0:00:20.8 Andrew Stotz: See, I already made a mistake right from the beginning, Jake, so you don't have to worry at all. [laughter] Let me introduce you to the audience. Jake Rodgers is the executive director of The W. Edwards Deming Institute. He's an educator, leader, and consultant with more than 20 years of experience as a teacher, principal, superintendent, and leadership coach. Jake, really, this has been long overdue to get you on the podcast. I think, everybody wants to understand your Deming journey, so take it away.   0:00:53.6 Jake Rodgers: Sure. Thanks, Andrew. It's so good to be here. This is actually my first podcast and first podcast with the Institute. And like you mentioned, long overdue. So I'm excited to be on here with you, and hopefully it's the first of many.   0:01:10.1 Andrew Stotz: Agree.   0:01:11.1 Jake Rodgers: Yeah. Okay. So how did I encounter Dr. Deming's philosophy? I've told this story a couple times, actually. Once at a Deming in Education conference back in 2015. But I was a fifth grade teacher back in 2008, I think it was. And we had just started, we had redesigned our system for how we support kids, who needed additional intervention, math and reading. And we had all the pieces in place. But once we got things going, the whole psychology piece was tough. We struggled with direction in meetings. There was quite a bit of conflict, even among people that were very good friends. We just couldn't get much done in the times that we were trying to figure out what do we do when kids need extra support?   0:02:23.9 Jake Rodgers: So I reached out to our principal, who said, "Hey, if you can find something, we'll pay for it," which is rare in education, increasingly rare. And I came across David Langford. Someone had referenced him, so I didn't know much about what he did, but we needed help. So I just called his office and he returned my call, and I told him a little bit about what was going on, and he said, "Oh, well, I can help you with that and a whole lot more, too." And I wasn't really interested in the whole lot more. I just wanted to stop the arguments and the conflict.   0:03:11.7 Andrew Stotz: That sounds like the alcoholic going to an AA meeting. "Look, I don't need all of that. I just want to stop drinking."   0:03:18.3 Jake Rodgers: Yes. That's all. Yeah. So, gosh, it wasn't too long after that a small team went out to Montana, and went to one of David's four-day conferences. And it totally transformed the way I thought about teaching, learning, leadership. It was a very memorable trip, because of the conference that David ran, but also with the four of us, we stayed up until 1, 2 o'clock in the morning every single night just talking about what we heard that day and what the implications were for the work we were doing. The things that stood out to me the most were bringing joy and meaning back to learning, getting kids more involved in designing, redesigning the classroom system, their learning. One of the great things that David does, he has, along with in his seminar going through the System of Profound Knowledge, he has a lot of tools that he teaches you to actually do the work, right? And so we went back and we started trying stuff, messed up a lot. I called David a lot, got some what he calls quality therapy, and eventually got a couple other team members involved. So our entire fifth grade team started doing this work. And after, I don't know, probably after two or three years, we started to see some good results. And during that time, I had gone back to school to get my principal accreditation.   0:05:17.2 Jake Rodgers: And I remember people telling me, "Jake, you need to, right after you're done with this program, you need to get a job as a principal, because if you wait too long, people will think you're unhireable." But I couldn't stop doing the work with my team, because we were having fun, and I think the kids were having fun. We were seeing some results, and it was something I wanted to get better at. Around maybe a couple years after that first conference, well, during that time, we had David out, and he did a couple more seminars with our school and then with a couple other schools in the school district. And then I got connected with the Seattle Area Deming Study Group, which was co-facilitated by Dave Nave, who I'm sure some of our listeners know, and also Al Viswanathan, two great mentors. Darlene Suyematsu, who used to work at the Institute, was also a part of that. That was a fantastic learning experience. That's the first time I read The New Economics.   0:06:40.0 Jake Rodgers: And I think, I had a fun time learning about how this applies outside of education. And I think the folks there at the study group also enjoyed trying to think about how does this apply in a fifth grade classroom or from a school leadership perspective. And then, I ended up moving to a new district, got a job as a principal, thought, "This worked so well with kids, adults are just going to eat this up." And they didn't. We had some definite bumps along the road, got some harsh feedback my first year.   0:07:28.4 Andrew Stotz: And when you say adults, what... Describe those who it was that you're talking about. What type of adults?   0:07:35.4 Jake Rodgers: Yeah, it was the teachers, the staff, support staff. It was a hard first year, for sure. When you're a teacher, you always think, "Oh, I could do that job as a principal better than they're doing it." But once I stepped into that role, I just had tremendous respect for the pressure, managing and leading change with a lot, you know in the public education system, there's a lot of required inputs, and so managing those in a way that, and a lot of them are antithetical to Deming's teachings. And so trying to protect staff and kids from some of the things that he would say do harm. Performance evaluations were one of those things that were a requirement. We had school-level evaluations from the state on how you're doing, and you get a report card and you basically get graded. And then your superintendent...   0:08:55.6 Andrew Stotz: Ranked.   0:08:56.9 Jake Rodgers: Ranked, absolutely. Yep. And then your superintendent comes in and says, based on the last data point, you need to do this, you need to change. So trying to navigate that constant pressure was tough. And yeah, like I said, I ended up having a lot more respect for people in that role. I remember, the first day of school, a parent walked into the office who did not speak English. They were Spanish-speaking and they were extremely upset, crying. And I had to find somebody to interpret. And turns out somehow their kid had gotten lost at the end of the day and we didn't know where they were either. I mean, long story short, the student went to the wrong place. We found them, all was fine, right. But I remember in the middle of that walking, I had to walk out of my office to, I think, use the restroom or something, and I just looked in the mirror and thought, "What have I gotten myself into here?"   [laughter]   0:10:07.1 Andrew Stotz: It's like you're responsible for everything. Like the buck stops here.   0:10:11.4 Jake Rodgers: Yeah, exactly. But that, as kind of a side note, that actually ended up being a tremendous opportunity. We used some tools with a number of the Spanish-speaking families, learned that, and they were a significant part of our population, 20%, 25%, and had grown quite a bit quickly over the last couple years before I got there. And we had learned that they just didn't feel like a part of the community. And so the system hadn't adapted yet to that change in the community. And so it was a cool opportunity to showcase how the use of some of these tools that we had learned from David and that are common in the quality world, how it raised the voice for people who weren't feeling heard in the community, gave them a lot of agency and autonomy to create some programs that helped the rest of the community understand who they were, what they valued, some of their traditions. So that was kind of a first big success from a situation that was pretty difficult. It turned into a definite win. So anyway, we kind of kept working at things for a couple years. And then in my third year, some of the team members were starting to kind of pick up on the use of some of the tools. We were improving some pretty critical processes at the school. People joked a lot about how much I used flowcharts.   0:12:13.4 Jake Rodgers: That was a good sign that people were starting to approach it with humor as opposed to just avoiding it. And then I had that opportunity to present at the Deming in Education conference in 2015 and brought a couple staff members along. One of them who co-presented with me did a great job. And I think that

Why do good strategic plans so often fail to produce different results? John Dues joins Andrew Stotz to explore a simple idea: organizations do not run on strategic plans. They run on the routines leaders and teams follow every day. From meetings and priorities to problem solving and learning, those routines form the management system that shapes results. Listen to a practical conversation about strategy, leadership, Deming, and designing an organization that can continually learn. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:00.0 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. Well, John, your most recent blog post, you titled it "The System Your Organization Actually Runs." Interesting title. And it starts with a question that I think every leader has probably asked at some point, which is, how does this strategic plan actually change what leaders do on Monday morning? Why did you start at that point?   0:00:50.1 John Dues: Yeah, thanks for having me back, Andrew. I think the article kind of gets at a question that I've found myself asking over the years as I've led school systems. And I've seen a lot of different strategic plans, and I've seen a lot of different strategic plans at my own organization. And most of them contain worthwhile goals. Most of them are written by leaders that want to genuinely improve their organization. I think the problem is, it wasn't the quality of the goals. It was... After reading the plan, I often couldn't tell how the leadership of that particular organization was actually going to operate once the plan was finished, or how at least how it was going to operate differently. And this is true of my own organization. The plan would tell me or those leaders where the organization wanted to go but it rarely said like how that was going to happen, what was going to happen differently every day in order to get there. And what I eventually basically came to the realization that this wasn't just a minor oversight or omission, it was like the central issue. And so that realization really changed how I started to think about strategic planning, 'cause I do think that's an important component of running an organization, but it's not the management system itself. It's just the starting point basically.   0:02:22.7 Andrew Stotz: There's a great book on strategy that I like called Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt and he basically focuses in on how bad most strategy is, and it's just lofty statements and generalizations with very little action and trade-offs that the senior management or the leaders are really making. And so it just plops in people's lap like, "Here's a good-feeling thing." So was there a specific moment when that clicked for you?   0:02:59.4 John Dues: Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I think what I think of when you mentioned that book, which I haven't read, "Good Strategy Bad Strategy," I think there certainly is good strategy and there is certainly bad strategy. But what I most often was seeing is like pretty good strategy that maybe a consultant would write. Like we did a strategic plan with a consultant, a great consultant about a decade ago and the strategic plan that that work resulted in was great and useful in some ways. But by and large, it did end up in the sort of stereotypical fancy binding and all kinds of colors and graphs and stuff like that, but it was mostly sitting on shelves and closets. It really wasn't formatted like literally and figuratively, it wasn't formatted in a way that was going to guide our work on a daily or a weekly or a monthly basis. So that experience, and I went through a couple of those types of strategic planning sessions with consultants over the years. So then I was thinking about what's actually happening is that, well, if the strategic plan mostly gets shelved, what is it exactly that is guiding and running the organization on that day-to-day basis?   0:04:30.4 Andrew Stotz: Interesting kind of distinction between the plan and the day-to-day running. So let's answer that question. If the strategic plan isn't the management system, what is it?   0:04:45.9 John Dues: Well, I think one thing is some people might be familiar with the management system terminology and some people may not. It probably has a technical meaning for a lot of people that are doing this type of work. But whether you use that terminology, "management system," in your organization or not, every organization has one. And so when a lot of people hear management system, they may picture some type of software system or some more formal operating manual. But that's not what I mean when I say there is a management system whether you realize it or not. I don't mean something formal necessarily. I'm just talking about a management system as a simple collection of like recurring leadership routines that determine how the organization actually functions. So it's things like how are priorities established? When you have meetings, how are they run? How frequently do the meetings occur? What measures are the leaders reviewing on a regular basis? How are problems surfaced in the organization? How do decisions get made? How the information flows? How leaders learn whether the organization is improving. So there's all kinds of these routines, and in some places they are not intentionally designed at all. But some version of those things are happening in every single organization. And in a lot of places they sort of just simply kind of evolve naturally on their own over time. But the thing that's similar, and it's pretty remarkable, is that whether you're doing this deliberately or not, these become like powerful behavior shapers in the day-to-day of an organization. So I think the key thing is that people respond much more to that daily management system, those leadership routines, and those things reinforce more so like the behavior of people that work in an organization more than what leaders say is important or more than what is written in a strategic plan that people often sort of shelve after the initial rollout and don't reference back very often.   0:07:16.7 Andrew Stotz: This makes me think of a quote by a guy named Stafford Beer, who is a systems thinker, and he said, "The purpose of a system is what it does."   0:07:23.8 John Dues: That's it, yes. That is it in essence, yeah.   0:07:31.0 Andrew Stotz: And the meaning of this is like never judge a system by its stated goals. This is also what Rumelt is talking about in "Good Strategy Bad Strategy." Don't judge it by its stated goals or its mission statement or what its designers have intended it to do. Really, we've gotta judge it by what it does. So you're saying every organization already has a management system then?   0:07:57.6 John Dues: Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, I think that's probably the biggest idea I was trying to get through in that most recent blog post, this idea that every organization has a management system whether they call it that or not. So the question is not its existence. The real question is, is there any intentionality behind the design of that system?   0:08:22.2 Andrew Stotz: So to follow that up, if every organization already has a management system, why do so many strategic plans fail to produce different results?   0:08:33.7 John Dues: Yeah, I mean, I think from what I've seen is that the goals and maybe the tactics and the strategic plans change every three years or every five years depending on how your organization does it but those management routines don't. So you spend all this time creating a new strategic plan and you may even do some things differently for a short time period, kind of like when you make a New Year's resolution, but you kind of settle back into those natural patterns if any changes were made in the first place at all. And so if you're a leader, you kind of just keep holding those same meetings, you kind of keep looking at the same reports, looking at the same data, you make decisions in the same way, you respond to problems in the same way. New initiatives sort of get absorbed up into that old existing management system. And so these initiatives come and they go but the system really doesn't change, kind of just like what you were saying with that quote. And then because the system doesn't change, the results usually don't change very much either. I think one follows from the other. So I think this is why two organizations, like two school systems can have pretty identical strategies and then produce completely different outcomes. And the difference usually isn't the plan, it's that management system that sort of lives underneath the plan. That's kind of how I think about it.   0:10:06.8 Andrew Stotz: It kind of makes me think of like a military. An army is told by their leader, "We're gonna take that hill," and then a new guy comes in and he goes, "I'm gonna change the plan. We're gonna take that hill and that hill." And then a new guy comes in and he goes, "We're gonna take that hill and that hill and that hill." And all of a sudden there's no tradeoff, there's no letting go, there's no sacrifice. And when you don't have a clear tradeoff, you're basically saying that we've got all these resources and we can do all this stuff. So it's interesting because most people would probably say that the problem is execution.   0:10:44.7 John Dues: Yeah. And I think... I mean, you run a business. I mean, execution, obviously...   0:11:01.7 Andrew Stotz: That's hard.   0:11:02.7 John Dues: It's critical. It's very critical. But the execution, how that goes, the execution itself is shaped by that management system. And so I think if you want different execution, you have to de

What happens when an organization gets so focused on results that it forgets why it exists? Andrew Stotz and Balaji Reddie dig into the first of Deming's 14 Points, constancy of purpose, using stories like Harvard's answer to Deming's challenge to define a business and Indian manufacturers who pivoted to build PPE during the pandemic. This conversation may change how you think about success, profit, and the real aim of a business. 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 Balaji Reddie, an educator and trainer in the teachings of Dr. Deming and quality management generally. I'm really excited for today's topic, which is the 14 Points. Take it away, Balaji.   0:00:27.5 Balaji Reddie: Thank you. Thank you, Andrew. So the last time we spoke, we had discussed all the four sciences that Dr. Deming put together. In a nutshell, we said his words, appreciation for a system. That means appreciating that there are no events, there are eventualities, and there is a huge myriad or a huge system of myriad components that create these outcomes. So we need to understand that. We need to appreciate the fact that these are all interconnected, interdependent, these components. Right. And we saw some other attributes that when they interact with each other, the cause and effect are not closely related in time or space. Seemingly disconnected events then turn out to be connected. There exist synergistic relationships. So you can't just straightaway say, "I know." You can say, "From what I understand or what knowledge I have right now about the system, I think."   0:01:34.7 Balaji Reddie: And you always dig deeper. Right. And that gave us the next thing, that the performance of any system, the outcomes are subject to Variation. You will never get the same outcome every single time. It keeps on fluctuating. And then we realize there is a difference between normal and abnormal fluctuations. The typical term that Walter Shewhart said was Variation, and Deming took that forward. He said, "Understand Variation." I would say learn how to think statistically. Right? And statistical thinking is about knowing when to act and when to leave a process alone. Okay. So we said understand the Variation, and you should know when to... There's that normal fluctuation, you would need to work on it continually. But abnormal fluctuation is a little easier to understand, isolate, and take immediate action. So the low-hanging fruit comes from the abnormal fluctuation, what he called as special causes or assignable causes, as Walter Shewhart said.   0:02:41.0 Balaji Reddie: And once you work on them, then your long-term work on the process continues. That never stops because it helps you understand the process much, much better. Right? But there you are faced with the dilemma sometimes. There's so many complications there, and you just need to understand them if you want to know completely what happens in a system. And that's why he said the complete knowledge is never... Is unknown and unknowable. But he said there's a way of doing that, and that's where the Theory of Knowledge came in. We needed to understand that we build upon what we have right now. We start asking questions, and you begin with theories. "I think, I believe." And once you start doing that, you start unraveling the mysteries of the system under study. And last bit here is all this, of course, he was speaking about man-made systems, organizational systems, which all this work is being done by people.   0:03:38.0 Balaji Reddie: And he said that's where the best part comes in. You can never do things all by yourself. You need to cooperate with others. Each one comes with their own theories, and each one has their own system of learning, their own way of thinking. So we need to understand that, whether you are employees inside a company, whether you are people outside the company contributing in the sense of suppliers, or people who are recipients of this in terms of consumers. So everyone, you need to understand people, that they're a part of this entire system. And that's where Psychology comes in. Of course, I used the word empathy. I said understanding them and on. And on a lighter note, I ended by saying that if you really want to sharpen your empathetic skills, you need to either understand your pet or a baby, because these are people who can't express what they want and you just have to have your own theories and then understand them better.   0:04:34.9 Balaji Reddie: But that's what we saw last time. Now we're gonna get to, funnily, what he espoused as his philosophy [chuckle] when he first presented it in the United States in a structured form, right? These were the 14 Points. Now, first of all, the 14 Points are not his philosophy, but they're 14 consequences of his philosophy. You can never really set out to say, "I'm gonna do these 14 Points." But when you start, how do I say, asking the right questions and want to gain Profound Knowledge of what's happening and start looking at things differently and start asking questions, the right kind of questions, just like I said, "What is the purpose of the system? What are the components? How are they connected? How do they work? What is happening right now? Does this normally happen? Is this abnormal?" And then, of course, what are better ways of explaining or expressing what I'm seeing right now?   0:05:43.9 Balaji Reddie: And then finally, taking help from everybody else and bringing their thought processes. When you start asking these questions and start structuring and understanding the organization much better, you eventually see the 14 Points. So they are consequences of his philosophy. They are not his philosophy. You end up with the 14 Points, you don't start with them. Right? Having said that, does that mean we just go through this and be done with it? I said, "No." Now let's understand how he structured these and why he structured it the way he did. Now, they are in no order of preference. In fact, I remember speaking to Bill Bellows about this, and he said when he asked Deming, "Which of the 14 Points are the most important ones? Where do I start?" and he said, "All of them." He said, "Where do I start?" "Start anywhere," he said. You could start anywhere, eventually they're all connected.   0:06:40.7 Balaji Reddie: So the 14 Points are a system themselves. They are all connected to each other. You could start anywhere and you end up with the 14 Points in any case. But since we have to follow a kind of the sequence in which he wrote them, which he presented them, I'm following that sequence to begin with. Now, I'm gonna start with the 1986 edition of the 14 Points, which are there in his book, Out of the Crisis. But in 1990, he updated the wordings of the 14 Points. So I shall pull up my document right here so that I can read out the 1990 edition. Just give me a minute.   0:07:36.0 Andrew Stotz: Just for the audience, go out there and get yours in your hand. Get ready. I'm just going through and getting mine ready.   0:07:42.8 Balaji Reddie: Yes, so. Okay, so here it goes. Let's get to the 14 Points. So here we are. Right. And in what I normally say here, that he often said too, that when you apply Profound Knowledge, the 14 Points help you apply this in the most structured manner. So here we go. So the first is the 1986 edition, point number one, where he says, "Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service with the aim to become competitive and to stay in business and to provide jobs." I think this is an amazing set of words which he's brought here, especially saying to provide jobs, where he said that quality is a ways and means of really contributing to society and not sucking the worst 10%, but adding something more to it to provide more jobs. Now in the 1990 edition, right, now the commentary for this, if you read Out of the Crisis, I've taken an excerpt from there, "Management must demonstrate unshakable commitment to quality, productivity and continual improvement.   0:09:09.8 Balaji Reddie: Your customers, your suppliers, your employees need your statement of constancy of purpose, your intention to stay in business by providing product and service that will help man to live better and which will have a market." So this was his definition of quality. A product or a service possesses quality if it helps someone live better in every way and enjoys a large and sustainable market. So for him, quality had two aspects. One, it must make someone's life better. Whatever you do, whether it's a product or a service, service being an activity. Right. So it should add value to the customer's life. It should make that person's life better. But it should be at a price the customer is willing to pay. Right? So that's the way he looked at it.   0:09:55.2 Balaji Reddie: Now, he changed this in 1990 to this, "Create and publish to all concerned a statement of the aims and purposes of the company or other organization. Management must demonstrate constantly their commitment to this statement." Now he says to publish the statement. And he says not just purpose, but aim. So aim, I think this came from his definition of a system, where he says that a system must have an aim. Without an aim, there is no system. So the aim provides a direction and purpose provides the reason why the system exists. So they go hand in hand. You can't separate these two. But now the commentary for this is, "A system must create something of value, in other words, results. The intended results, along with consideration of recipients and of cost, mold the aim of the system. It is thus management's task to determine those aims, to manage the whole organization towards accomplishment of those aims.   0:11:07.1 Balaji Reddie: It is important that an aim neve

"Every time this child was proven wrong, he learned something new." In this episode, Andrew Stotz continues his conversation with Balaji Reddie as they explore two essential elements of Dr. Deming's System of Profound Knowledge: the Theory of Knowledge and Psychology. Through the memorable story of a young boy trying to understand how his father's scooter starts, Balaji illustrates how we build theories, test them through experience, and improve them through learning. The discussion also explores why PDSA begins with theory, why experience alone is not enough, and why understanding how people learn is fundamental to leading improvement. Whether you're new to Deming or deep into his work, this episode offers practical insights into how better questions lead to better knowledge and, ultimately, better management.   Are you ready to learn more about the System of Profound Knowledge? Check out DemingNEXT online learning! https://deming.org/learn/demingnext/   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 Balaji Reddie, an educator and trainer in the teachings of Dr. Deming, and quality management generally. The topic for today is: The theory of knowledge and psychology. Take it away.   0:00:29.8 Balaji Reddie: Well, thank you. Good morning, Andrew. And it's great to continue our series. So the last time we met, we had begun with the Profound Knowledge, where we said that Dr. Deming brought together four, seemingly disconnected, sciences. He never invented any single one of them, but he saw the connections, and he created, what you could say is, a bootstrap theory of management, if I may say so, a very all-encompassing view of things happening around you. That's why he had no other word to describe it except profound. Because you see things that you normally would not see. That's what we said the last time. And when he proposed that, all of a sudden, I told you the funny thing was that experts in each of those sciences jumped in. I think they realized that they were caught napping, that they did not see the connections, and they did not see a bare minimum set of competencies that you need to have in order to understand things in their entirety. It was very, very... It was amazing that he actually could put that all together.   0:01:44.3 Balaji Reddie: So we started off with the four sciences, in no order of preference. We said here... His words were appreciation for a system. That means, taking into consideration the fact that everything... Having a holistic view, that what we see is not an event but an eventuality, that there's a huge big system behind it. Whatever we get to see in front of our eyes, we're just getting to see the effect. So appreciating that, that's what he said, for a system, a systemic view. I just used a different word, I said connectedness. And I said that from now on, we say that there are no events, there are only eventualities. Which means when something happens in front of our eyes, we always question... We bring in the concept of time and space; that the origins of this, what I'm seeing in front of my eyes, lie somewhere else and maybe actually in a different time frame. So I need to study deeper in order to understand why I'm seeing this in front of my eyes. And you gave that fantastic example of coffee beans, where you said everything has to happen at the right time. So that was the first one.   0:02:54.1 Balaji Reddie: Second one, was about understanding variation. And I would say, that's statistical thinking. I think around 1998, I saw someone come out with the definition of statistical thinking. And they said that it's a holistic view of looking at a process, that everything in the world, happens in the form of a process, and all processes are subject to variation. And understanding and reducing that variation, is synonymous to increasing quality. Now, I'd just like to make a slight change there. Yes, all processes are subject to variation, but talking about reducing... I think, understanding and managing that variation, would lead to better quality. And his entire insistence was understanding variation. Although, let me tell you this, in Henry Neave's book, he wrote about this, where he said that in one of the weekend chats that they had with Deming, he made a statement that if I had to reduce my message to managers in two words, I would say: reduce variation. And this, I've heard from both Henry Neave and David Kerridge. For those who are unaware of who David Kerridge was, because he passed away, I think, around 2018 or 2019, I can't remember... Or maybe before. I'm forgetting the year.   0:04:32.1 Balaji Reddie: But this was... He was from Aberdeen, Scotland. And people used to say, he's like an unofficial person who could be the successor to Deming. So he wrote a lot of wonderful papers. So David Kerridge, Henry, and I, were sitting together having dinner, and they were talking about Deming, and they said that, yeah, he did not... There were some things where he could get really, really upset about when he... About performance appraisals. But there are some things when he spoke of Shewhart, Walter Shewhart, he spoke in a very different tone. And then came this topic, that when we told him that you said reduce variation, he said, "I never said that." They said, "But you said it. We have it... We wrote it down, both Henry and I." And he said, "I could have said that in a context, but I don't think I meant it in that way." So for the record, yes, he uttered it; but he meant it differently. I'm quite sure he said to understand and manage that variation.   0:05:35.4 Balaji Reddie: So what is that managing variation? Okay. We saw this last time, in the very narrow sense of the term, that is when Walter Shewhart invented the control chart. He said there are two kinds of variation that exist: natural variation and unnatural variation. And to distinguish between these two, he created the control chart, which was based on... It was an empirical formula, and people confused it to be a statistical thing. He demarcated, brought in two lines, what he called as the upper control limit and lower control limit. And he said as long as the outcomes of any process or system, if you could measure them and you're plotting them on a graph, as long as they lie within these limits, well, that's the natural behavior of the process or system under study. And the moment their performance crosses the limits, one of these limits on the higher side or the lower side, then you can say there's something unique, special, that has happened. So he used the term, random variation, and assignable cause variation. Because he said you could assign a particular cause to the points that lie outside limits. But when you are studying the variation that lie within limits, the variation that lies within limits, then you can't ascribe a particular cause. There is a system of causes acting. This particular difference in approach...   0:06:58.1 Andrew Stotz: That's a great point. The assignable thing is a great, great point. It really helped me just understand it better.   0:07:04.7 Balaji Reddie: Oh, yeah. Because you could assign a particular, that's why he said assignable. And this is random. Assignable, has its advantage that you can isolate it. And initially, he said you could isolate, and you could eliminate, that cause because it is something which is alien to the system under study. And one by one by one, when he said you eliminate all those causes, you land up with a system or a process that fluctuates only within limits, and he called that as a statistically controlled process. Now, he said your real work begins when you start looking into the reasons for each of those points lying within limits, and I made that statement. You don't have one cause, you have a system of causes. Here's where we studied systems the last time, and I'm just refreshing all of this. I said that in a system, you have interconnectedness, you have interdependencies. And then cause and effect are not closely related in time or space. You have synergistic relationships. So when you start studying, it becomes very, very complicated. Because the performance of each of those causes is also subject to variation. So you can never, ever tell with absolute certainty, what is causing the system variation. Because each of the causes is part of a bigger system. So he made that statement that the complete knowledge of any process or system, is unknown and unknowable. He was not being pessimistic; he was being realistic. We discussed this the last time. And so I said, what do we do then? Yeah, we'll come to that. But now comes the other part, which gets really, really interesting.   0:08:46.7 Andrew Stotz: By the way, I want to... Before you move on from the variation, I want to add something. But continue on.   0:08:55.2 Balaji Reddie: Okay. So he said the reason for the point lying outside... And I said it's assignable, what Dr. Deming called as, special cause variation. You can assign a cause, and I said it's alien to the system under study. And I started by saying you can eliminate it. And even Walter Shewhart began by saying, eliminate it. But now, I'm going back on my words slightly. If you eliminate that special cause, it could be a special cause for the system under study, but it could be the common cause of another system which is related to this. And so what can you do? Well, here's the best part that comes in. You reduce the effect of that cause, to the extent that it does not cause any harmful variation here, to the system under study. And that, Andrew, is optimization. "I want this, and I want that", not, "I want this, or I want that." So I need that.   0:10:01.0 Balaji Reddie: Because I can begin with eliminating, but then I have to keep my eyes and ears op

What if the best leaders are not the ones with the biggest ideas? In this episode, John Dues argues that the leaders who make the greatest impact are the ones who create the fastest learning cycles. John and Andrew Stotz explore why small tests often outperform large initiatives, how PDSA builds real organizational knowledge, and why improvement is a learning process, not an implementation process. If your organization is launching new initiatives, this conversation offers a different question to ask: What's the smallest test we can run to learn whether this idea actually works? TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with 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 the Fastest Way to Learn What Works. I love that title, John. Take it away.   0:00:30.0 John Dues: Hey Andrew, it's good to be back. Yeah, I was thinking about talking about leadership today, and I was thinking about who are the leaders that we tend to admire? I think the typical person would say these leaders with big, bold ideas. In my world, a superintendent launches this district-wide initiative, or maybe it's a principal has this sweeping school improvement plan that they've put in place. In your world, maybe some CEO unveils this new strategic direction. We think about these leaders, if they're described, they're visionary, decisive, courageous. But I think, as I've done this study, I've become increasingly convinced that we're paying attention to the wrong leaders in a lot of cases...   0:01:31.6 Andrew Stotz: So the right leaders are the ones that have their pen over their right ear.   0:01:36.9 John Dues: Always. That's the mark. That is the mark...   0:01:39.6 Andrew Stotz: I think I see that on you.   0:01:43.9 John Dues: I'm definitely not describing me. I'm just an observer, observer of the world. But I think these leaders make these big promises, but I'm increasingly convinced that the leaders who we should be paying more attention to are the ones that create these fast learning cycles. So in a typical place, a company or something, a school, they're faced with a problem. These leaders don't immediately ask, "How do we scale this? How do we scale this idea?" I think they're turning to a different question, and that's, "What's the smallest test we can run to learn whether this idea actually works?" It's a very different, very different question. And I think it's tough because this is a question that's not gonna make headlines, but I think it's one of the more important questions that a leader can ask...   0:02:49.9 Andrew Stotz: Isn't a great leader supposed to be doing the big things? You're talking about the smallest.   0:02:52.8 John Dues: The big things, right, the large initiatives, that's what gets attention. But I think the larger the initiative, the problem is the longer it takes to learn whether that thing, that idea, is helping or hurting or maybe having no effect at all. And I think what happens is, and what I've seen in schools repeatedly, I'm sure it's probably the same in the private sector, is oftentimes by the time the evidence actually arrives, if it ever does, so much time, money, and goodwill has been spent that it almost doesn't matter whether the idea itself was successful. All this cost was sunk into training people, all these new expectations have been established, and then we almost become more invested in proving the initiative was the right decision. And then once that happens, it's almost impossible to go about learning if it's actually having the effect that we intended to. And I think a lot of this has to do with many improvement efforts that I see. They start with a solution. They're sort of starting with not a clear definition of the problem, but this idea that they think is gonna have an impact, whatever that is. It could be a new curriculum in a school, an attendance campaign because attendance has been a big thing lately, some type of new evaluation process that they're gonna use with teachers or workers, whatever. But the point is that the assumption is that the solution's known at the beginning and that success really just depends on implementation. But I think the problem I see is that no one stops and thinks, "What if this solution actually doesn't work in our system?" We copy these ideas, we've seen this thing, whatever it is, work somewhere else, and we almost don't even consider whether the context matters. And it's maybe the most important thing to consider.   0:05:11.7 Andrew Stotz: I think about Deming, Dr. Deming, saying, "How would they know?"   0:05:16.0 John Dues: How would they know? Yeah. And I think, again, so much gets sunk into the initiative, all that training, all the money, all the resources, whatever. At a certain point, the organization is so invested that they almost sort of solidify into defending the idea rather than trying to learn whether it's actually working. That tipping point, I think, can happen pretty quickly, especially if it's a large, organization-wide initiative.   0:05:50.5 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, and I can imagine a new person coming... A superstar coming in from another place where they implemented something that really worked, and now they're going, "Let's do it in our..." and that may or may not have the same impact in that new location that that person's responsible for.   0:06:09.6 John Dues: Yeah. And I think almost immediately the conversation then shifts from learning whether the idea is working to confirming what everyone hopes will happen. I think that might be the most dangerous moment in an organization. And so the purpose that I'm talking about, testing on a small scale, is not actually to verify the idea. The purpose is to learn whether the idea survives contact with reality. A good scientist, for example, their first step when they have a hypothesis is try to falsify it. And I feel like if it was ever taught to education or business leaders, that idea has been completely lost to history. And maybe even in some respects in the science world too, that falsification principle is sort of... That's the first step when you're testing an idea. That is not what I've experienced as an educator. I don't know if you've had that same experience in the business world.   0:07:21.9 Andrew Stotz: Yep, yep. I'm just thinking about that quote about no plan survives first contact with the enemy. I know von Clausewitz said it. There was another guy that said it, I think, before him, but it's just so, so true.   0:07:41.2 John Dues: Yeah. And I think this other way of thinking that I'm talking about is so counter to how most organizations operate. Once that solution is selected, whatever it is, the focus completely shifts to implementation and adoption. But the thing is, improvement, at its most fundamental level, it's a learning process. It's not an implementation process. And so... So often we're asking, how do we roll this thing out? I think a good leader, what they're gonna ask, is how can we learn more about this idea as quickly as possible? Right? This other way of thinking, this small testing, it reduces risk, generates feedback, reveals obstacles that you're blind to initially. But most importantly, it creates knowledge, like real working knowledge in your system, in the context where this idea is eventually... When it does roll out system-wide, where it's gonna have to work. And the thing is, is if it works at that small level, you can expand it. If it fails, you can cut your losses when not much has been lost in the way of time, resources, that type of thing. But either way, the organization is gonna learn from that small test...   0:09:09.2 Andrew Stotz: I found it, by the way.   0:09:10.6 John Dues: Oh, go ahead.   0:09:11.9 Andrew Stotz: Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, a Prussian field marshal and military strategist. The closest translation was, "No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main strength." Or summarized as, "No plan survives first contact with the enemy." So it wasn't Mike Tyson who said it first when he said, "Everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face."   0:09:45.3 John Dues: Yeah, right, same idea. I think the Prussians had quite a bit of revolutionary ideas coming out of their military prowess. I think the organizational structure maybe came even from Prussian military hierarchies and stuff like that.   0:09:54.0 Andrew Stotz: Definitely.   0:10:02.8 John Dues: Yeah, but I think, going back to my original sort of statement about which leaders get branded as outstanding or great or leaders to pay attention to, is those large initiatives attract attention, right? And we tend to celebrate those leaders with bold visions or these big plans, sweeping announcements. They're decisive and courageous because when you make those pronouncements, it appears as if they know exactly where the organization could go next or should go next. I think the problem here is that confidence can so easily be mistaken for knowledge. And often, especially in the world that I live in, not just schools but urban schools, the average superintendent is only in their seat for three or so years. Some a little more, some, a lot, a lot less. And so by the time you find out whether the thing worked or didn't, the person's gone. They're on to the next thing, and no one remembers what exactly they promised to do when they got here three years ago...   0:11:18.7 Andrew Stotz: He was really good. "I liked him. He was nice. I thought he had some good ideas."   0:11:21.5 John Dues: Right, right.   0:11:24.4 Andrew Stotz: "Who's our new boss now?"   0:11:27.4 John Dues: Yeah. And so they get this r

What if better management starts with seeing connections that were there all along? In this conversation, Balaji Reddie and Andrew Stotz unpack one of the most powerful and overlooked ideas in management: that everything is connected. Drawing on Dr. W. Edwards Deming's systems thinking, he explains why the problems we face today were set in motion long before we noticed them, and why the solutions are rarely where we think to look.    Along the way, a cup of coffee becomes a window into five years of invisible effort, hydrogen and oxygen defy everything we'd expect, and a classroom game reveals that cooperation isn't a soft ideal — it might just be human nature. Whether you run a team of two or a global organization, this episode will quietly shift the way you read a situation, ask a question, or respond to a problem. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussions with Balaji Reddie, an educator and trainer in the teachings of Dr. Deming and quality management generally. The topic for today is connectedness, which will help you see things you normally would not see. Balaji, how are you?   0:00:30.7 Balaji Reddie: I'm good, I'm fine.   0:00:32.5 Andrew Stotz: Nice to connect with you.   0:00:34.1 Balaji Reddie: Yes, same here.   0:00:35.3 Andrew Stotz: Connectedness day.   0:00:36.5 Balaji Reddie: Yeah, connectedness, absolutely. Yeah, we chose this term very carefully, right?   0:00:42.6 Andrew Stotz: I suspect you have, given your precision.   [laughter]   0:00:47.4 Balaji Reddie: Yeah, to see things that you normally would not see, let me attribute this to Henry Neave, who said that he heard Deming say this during his last three or four seminars in England, right? In Britain rather. Yeah, I think it was mostly in England. And he said, when he heard him say that, he said, "I am not here to teach you anything new. I'm here to make you see things that you normally would not see." And I would like to just expand on that and say when you see things differently, obviously, you observe, you record different things. And when you record different things, you ask different questions. When you ask different questions, you get different answers. And when you get different answers, you draw different conclusions. When you draw different conclusions, you take different decisions. And when you take different decisions, you get different results. It's insanity to expect different results by asking the same questions every single time. So management is not so much about giving the right answers as much as it is about asking the correct questions. And I think Dr. Deming helps you do that. He helps you ask the correct questions.   0:02:02.2 Balaji Reddie: Now coming to the word connectedness. We spoke about the System of Profound Knowledge, a unified theory of leadership and management, where Dr. Deming brings together four sciences. And the first one he says about systems thinking, or what he called as appreciation for a system, appreciation for a fact that everything is systemic. There's nothing that happens in isolation, right? And the second one, of course, he said was understanding variation, then understanding theory of knowledge and understanding psychology. But he said, all four are equally important, et cetera. And then comes the, I won't say contradictory, but a chapter before Profound Knowledge on systems especially. So that's where I decided to use the word connectedness, that all these are connected. What did he mean by that? So I believe he wanted people to learn about connectedness and systems first.   0:03:01.6 Balaji Reddie: So let's dive right there. What did he always say about systems, or connectedness as we say here? And let's get into his definition for system. And he says that "a system is a network," right, "of interdependent components that work together to achieve the aim of the system." And then he says "every system must have an aim. Without an aim, there is no system." And very well articulated throughout this book which he wrote, he always began with aim of the chapter. Even in Out of the Crisis, he always started with aim of a chapter. So network of interdependent components. So let's just break it down, because the three important words are network, interdependent, and aim. And he says aim comes first because without the aim, there is no system.   0:04:00.6 Balaji Reddie: Right. And he goes on to tell us what the aim of a system should be. Okay. He says here that the recommended aim should be for everybody to gain. Now, in one of the paragraphs there, management's job, where he says should be to make it clear, the first step is clarification. Everyone in the organization must understand the aim and how to direct their efforts towards the aim, right? And everyone must understand, okay, this is important. The danger and loss to the whole organization from a team that seeks to become a selfish, independent profit center. Right. So he says here we need to give both, why we need to do what we need to do. And he says the aim precedes the system. Now, I would like to leave this discussion right here. We will cover this in our 14 Points, our session on the 14 Points, because I believe the word aim and purpose are, they go hand in hand. Aim gives us a direction and purpose gives us the reason why we exist, right? And so the direction of all the efforts, you can see the development. He says here, he gives some examples that the system must create something of value. In other words, results. The intended results along with consideration of recipients and of cost mold the aim of the system. So he said it should be something that makes life better for everyone.   0:05:39.8 Balaji Reddie: Now, he was talking about a man-made system here. Remember, he wrote this for organizations, but I think I mentioned this before that this can equally be applied to natural systems, if you want to really study them in detail. I remember talking to Barbara Lawton about this, and I said, "Natural systems, they do have an aim. It's just that we've not understood it." The purpose and aim of, in fact, that was the basis for my paper, which I delivered at the Deming Research Seminar in 2002. And the title of my paper was Deming and Ecology. And I was trying to put together the thoughts of the physicist Fritjof Capra, who wrote some wonderful books like The Tao of Physics, The Turning Point, The Web of Life, and The Hidden Connections. And The Systems View of Life is also one of the sub-books or booklets that he came out with. But these were his wonderful books. At the time, he had not yet written The Hidden Connections, right? So based on his three books that I had read up until then, of course, one was called Uncommon Wisdom, where he reproduced some of the interviews he had with some systems thinkers in the world, including people not from conventional systems thinking. For example, he also reproduced his interaction with the then Prime Minister or the ex-Prime Minister of India, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, and how he spent time with her, because he was over here in India for quite some time studying the language Sanskrit and studying the texts over here, because he learned about systems thinking even deeper.   0:07:25.1 Balaji Reddie: So over there, he wanted to, he raised a question, what is the purpose? So I wanted to use Dr. Deming's theories to understand the purpose of a natural system and what is the purpose of man [laughter] in this natural system. So that was my theory. And that's when this aim thing became more and more clear. And Barbara said, "No, you're right. There is an aim. It's just that we're trying to understand it. Without that, you won't have the system working so beautifully. There is something that is at work." Right. And he says here, management of a system. And then he says that a system includes the future. And now here's where, when you talk about system includes the future, he mentions Peter Senge in his book, if you know about The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. And that's where this fantastic statement comes in because he says delayed effects. So although, Deming never used these words directly, but here I am putting among the first principles of systems thinking is that cause and effect are not closely related in time or space. Right. And that gives a lot of frightening conclusions, or inferences that you can draw from this. If I say that, by the way, that cause and effect are not closely related in time or space, and if I ask you what you understand by this statement, your first knee-jerk reaction would be what I do today, the consequences would be felt in another time at another place. Absolutely right. That's exactly what this means. But the converse is also true. What we get to see in front of our eyes, the origins are at another time and another place.   0:09:15.9 Balaji Reddie: So we only see the event, but systems thinking teaches us there are no events in this world. There are only eventualities. Now, this comes into play when you start doing a study, typically when people learn about quality, and then the first thing they learn is to, okay, identify a problem and try to solve it, right? And then they start asking the question, "Why did this happen?" And then you draw a fishbone diagram, which is, you know, one of the most popular tools. But the problem there is you need to arrange the causes logically and not categorically. And you also need to take into account that these causes are also related to each other. You can't isolate them. And the fact that, there could be an element of time over here, right, that this is a delayed effect that you're seeing. So the effect comes much later. And sometimes it could be weeks and months. So you have to take that into account, righ

"I'm not here to teach you anything new. I'm here to make you see things that you normally would not see." — Dr. W. Edwards Deming In this episode, Deming educator Balaji Reddie reveals the practices that are hiding in plain sight within most organizations. Practices that feel normal. That get celebrated. And that quietly undermine everything you're building. One example: arbitrary targets. An employee collected 2 million rupees in a single day — four times his target. He told no one and did nothing for four days. Because he knew his manager would just raise the bar. That single moment of silence cost the company a genuine breakthrough. This is what Deming called a "faulty practice." And there are many more where that came from. Host Andrew Stotz and Balaji dig into Chapter 2 of The New Economics — Deming's most overlooked chapter. They cover why ranking employees is built on a mathematical illusion. Why chasing quarterly results destroys long-term value. And why the best leaders, from Steve Jobs to Walt Disney, ignored the pressures that trap most organizations. 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 discussions with Balaji Reddie. He's an educator and a trainer in the teachings of Dr. Deming and quality management generally. And the topic for today is becoming aware of faulty practices. Take it away, Balaji.   0:00:26.0 Balaji Reddie: Good morning. Thank you, Andrew. So part three of our series, what we're looking at. So last time we met, we spoke about essentially Point number 14, because we outlaid his profound knowledge. And then I always said that he gave us a lot of clues as to what needed to be done. So I started out by reading some of the excerpts from the book, which we tend to ignore. And then he said, "Here's what I expect." So he expected leadership, a critical mass to be created, and then he gave attributes of a leader. So we listed 17 of those points, which we said principles of leadership. And now once you've created that critical mass and there's someone who's taken the lead and there are a bunch of leaders, maybe, so what do we do next? So when you start becoming aware that you are now in a prison, so to say, because that's what he said here, that they feel it's a fixture, and this is the way things are, this is how things always have been. So he says, "No, you need to understand that these things are wrong." Right? And you first need to become aware, and then we need to look at what needs to be done, perhaps. So he's given some suggestions, and you could always adapt and adopt this. So most of this would be taken from the book, The New Economics, chapter two, which he has titled as "The Heavy Losses." Now, remember, when he wrote this book, it was after the other book, Out of the Crisis, where he had listed his 14 Points. Yes, but he also listed diseases and obstacles. And people tend to ignore that.   0:02:18.9 Balaji Reddie: In fact, I remember having a chat with Bill Bellows on this, and I said, "Diseases and obstacles." And he said, "Obstacles?" I said, "Yes, he has listed 16 obstacles in Out of the Crisis." And he said, "Oh, wow." And he took his copy and he said, "Oh, yeah, you're right. There are 16 of them." And so sometimes you see things that you normally would not see. So when he wrote this, initially, I think many people thought that it was just an extension of those Diseases. But when you start looking deeper, you'll find that he became more elaborate in what he listed as the heavy losses. So he says here that these are things that you start observing and you say, "This is not normal." So the language that he's used is pretty, pretty clear. Present practice, so faulty practices. The present practice, and he says these are only reactive. You only need certain skills and not nearly any theory of management. Whereas when you opt to go to a better practice, you need a theory. So let's start with the very first faulty practice. And this stems from his 14 points too. He says, "Lack of constancy of purpose, short-term thinking, and emphasis on immediate results. Think in the present tense, no future tense." And then he becomes more elaborate and says, "Keep up the price of the company's stock and maintain dividends."   0:04:02.0 Balaji Reddie: Which, well, okay, it seems like you should not do that. No. He says here, you fail to optimize through time. Make this quarter look good, ship everything on hand at the end of the month or quarter, never mind its quality, mark it as shipped, show it as accounts receivable, and defer till the next quarter repairs, maintenance, and orders for material. Just a word here, in the new edition of The New Economics, there's been a spelling mistake there. So if anyone's listening, you can just correct it in the next edition that comes out. Instead of "defer till the next quarter," he's written "defer toll the next quarter." So we need to correct that in the next printing. Now he says here, a better practice...   0:04:52.1 Andrew Stotz: And before you go to there, can we just talk about this for a second?   0:04:56.1 Balaji Reddie: Sure.   0:04:57.8 Andrew Stotz: One of the things that, having been a financial analyst all my career, we get quarterly results from companies in the stock market. And in my own business, of course, I look at monthly results because we close the books every month. And it's definitely one... Donald Trump recently came up with the idea of telling companies not to report quarterly results. And I believe the Singapore Stock Exchange also came up with the idea of maybe we'll reduce the amount of reporting to maybe half-yearly, because we do have half-yearly reporting in some countries, right?   0:05:39.6 Balaji Reddie: Right.   0:05:40.9 Andrew Stotz: But having learned the teachings of Dr. Deming many years ago, long before I became a financial analyst, I always thought, I never really got this one because I thought, what an idiot you would be if you're running a company and all you could see was the market's demand for quarterly performance. And I've always admired those people, I think Jeff Bezos was one that really made it very explicit. "If you're here for quarterly performance, you're not gonna get it." And so I always have said to CEOs, having seen analysts and fund managers, I've visited, taken fund managers more than 1,000 times to meet with CEOs, and CEOs ask me, "What's your advice from seeing all that?" And I said, "Don't listen to this too much." Take it on board, what the discussions are about, but you're the CEO. Your job is to optimize the value of this business. And that means, that doesn't mean making quarterly numbers, manipulating things to make quarterly numbers. So part of what I've said to people is, "Get a backbone. Don't come and complain to me, 'Oh, yeah, but the pressure of the market's quarterly.' Come on." You know and I know that the job of a CEO is to maximize the value of the business, not the quarterly result. So anyways, that's my little pet peeve.   0:07:13.6 Balaji Reddie: Yeah. Yeah, that's right. And if you look at even Jobs, Steve Jobs, when he came back as Apple CEO, he had the nerve and the spine, like you said, to tell the board, "Don't judge me on this. It's gonna take time. And believe me," he said, "someday you will see results." Now, unfortunately, he was not there to see what he's created, but I think anyone in Apple can safely say that they're growing because of the foundation that he laid so long back, right? And I think that was one of the major reasons why he did not make Jonathan Ive as the CEO, because he wanted him to focus on the product and the customer rather than the quarterly results. And I don't think Apple ever played it by quarterly results.   0:08:04.9 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And here's a good book called Competition Demystified by Bruce Greenwald. And there's a passage in here that's interesting because he published the book back in 2005, so it was long before Steve Jobs really made the company profitable. And he had basically gone through and explained the situation at that time as a strategist looking at the company. And what he said, it says, he just said that "Jobs had managed to restore operating margins, but Apple survived, it had hardly prospered, its future does not look bright." And I use this as an example in my strategy class to help people understand that when you're building strategy, you're thinking long term. And the ecosystem that Steve Jobs created, the value of that ecosystem didn't really truly appear until many years after he was working on it. So anyways.   0:09:06.6 Balaji Reddie: Yeah, so that's a classic case here.   0:09:11.1 Andrew Stotz: Let's keep going. You're on a roll.   0:09:14.5 Andrew Stotz: Oh, that's okay. So now better practice, he says, theory of management. Now see what he writes here. He says, "Adopt and publish the constancy of purpose." Now, that's one of the things that he also changed in his 14 points in the 1990 edition, which he never really published in a book but he gave as handouts in his seminars. Earlier on, it was "Create a constancy of purpose," but he says now, "Publish it." And it should be a proper statement, right? And he also said not just for the company, but for other organization. Now, he perhaps was envisioning or he already saw what is happening in the world today, that it's not one company against another, it's a family of companies against another family of companies, if I may say so. And these companies are globally dispersed, so there has to be something that binds them together, and that's the constancy of purpose. And purpose is why we exist, right?   0:10:13.4 Andrew Stotz: And I want to ask about this.   0:10:15.3 Balaji Reddie: Right.   0:10:16.2 Andrew Stotz: Professor, can I ask you about this?   0:10:

What does great leadership actually look like? Can you make a difference even if you're in the middle of the hierarchy? "If you think you're too small, you've not spent the night under a bedsheet with a mosquito." In this episode, educator and Deming practitioner Balaji Reddie explains why W. Edwards Deming was far more practical about leadership than many people realize. Drawing on both The New Economics and Out of the Crisis, Balaji shares stories and examples that bring Deming's 17 principles of leadership to life. From creating trust and joy in work to understanding variation, coaching people, and improving systems, this conversation challenges conventional management thinking and offers a clear path toward transformation. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 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 Balaji Reddie, who is an educator and trainer in the teachings of Dr. Deming and quality management generally. And the topic for today is Principles of Leadership. Balaji, take it away.   0:00:27.9 Balaji Reddie: Good morning. Thank you so much, Andrew. We had left our last session with that, we'd be dealing with this. And of course, Dr. Deming gave us the outline of Profound Knowledge and he gave us 14 points. He also gave us the deadly diseases and the 16 Obstacles. So people often talk about the diseases, but very often they forget the obstacles. And there are 16 of them which he highlighted for us. And if you think that they're outdated, they're as relevant as they ever were. So you need to keep revisiting those. I think if you start working on removing the obstacles, it's like you're taking your foot off the brake rather than pressing on the accelerator.   0:01:11.3 Balaji Reddie: So you're removing the things that actually stop you before you actually take things forward. But nevertheless, we start with point number 14 where he says, take action to complete, to make the transformation. And he says that there should be a critical mass of people that you need to educate and train and get them on the same page as you are. I'm gonna quote Hazel Cannon here, who is current president of the British Deming Forum. And she talks about the time when she was very young and she attended the Deming four-day seminar, I think in Birmingham. And at the end of those four days, she was overwhelmed as you normally are when you hear how the man speak. And he spoke... He wanted you to make drastic changes. It's not just tinkering here and there.   0:02:08.2 Balaji Reddie: And so she went up to him and she said, "I'm really taken up by what you just said." And then she made a statement, "I'm too small to make these changes in my organization." I believe she worked as a lab assistant in a chemical manufacturing company. They used to make chemicals for cosmetics. So she said, "I'm too small." And Deming just interrupted her and said, "Never think you're too small. If you think you're too small, you've not spent the night under a bedsheet with a mosquito." So make a change where you are and take it from there. So I would like to now quote Dr. Deming from Out of the Crisis. This is Plan for Action: Take action to accomplish the transformation. So he writes there, there are three points and then I'll come to what he writes below that.   0:03:01.8 Balaji Reddie: So he says, "Management in authority will struggle over every one of the above 13 points, the deadly diseases, and the obstacles. They will agree on their meaning and on the direction to take. They will agree to carry out the new philosophy. Management in authority will take pride in their adoption of the new philosophy and in their new responsibilities. They will have courage to break with tradition, even to the point of exile among their peers." So he talks about courage. He talks about courage of conviction. And then he says, "Management in authority will explain by seminars and other means." So I think he leaves it to people of the ways and means. And now today there are a lot of means of doing that. DemingNEXT is one of them. And he says, "To the critical mass of people in the company why change is necessary and that the change will involve everybody."   0:04:00.9 Balaji Reddie: Now he writes something very interesting. He says, "This whole movement may be instituted and carried out by middle management speaking with one voice." So he gave instructions. Why are people saying that he did not tell us what to do? It is just that he expected maybe a lot. And now let's get to that middle management and what he expected. He says here... Let's see here. I'm coming to chapter four now in The New Economics where he says, "A System of Profound Knowledge. The aim of this chapter: the prevailing style of management must undergo transformation." So we just heard that, that what we need to do. And he says, "A system cannot understand itself. The transformation requires a view from the outside. The aim of this chapter is to provide an outside view, a lens that I call a System of Profound Knowledge.   0:04:59.7 Balaji Reddie: It provides a map of theory by which to understand the organizations that we work in." Then he says, "The first step is transformation of the individual. This transformation is discontinuous. It comes from understanding the System of Profound Knowledge." Then he says that "the individual, once transformed, will set an example." So setting an example, I believe, is doing the right thing under adverse circumstances, when you stick to your principles despite the fact that there is an easier way out. As they say, choosing a path between good and bad is easy, you choose good. But good and better, you need to make the right choice. And that needs profound knowledge. "So be a good listener," he says, "but will not compromise. Continually teach other people and help people pull away from their current practice and beliefs and move to the new philosophy without a feeling of guilt about the past."   0:06:02.7 Balaji Reddie: So he explains to us what was needed here, right? And he says this is what we actually need to do. Now I'd like to, I mean, I'll be referring to a document. I don't know how we're gonna get this to people, but for the Principles of Leadership. All right, I think I'll have to send this over to you later, but we will do that. So in the Principles of Leadership, just come to them. I am quoting again from both Out of the Crisis and The New Economics. So you will find this there when he speaks about what needs to be done. Modern Principles of Leadership. And he says, "The modern principles of leadership will replace the annual performance review. The first step in a company will be to provide education in leadership." So that would be introducing people to profound knowledge from what we just heard. Then he said, "The annual performance review may then be abolished." Of course, that will take time. "Leadership will take its place, and this is what Western management should have been doing all along."   0:07:12.6 Balaji Reddie: So he says, "The annual performance review sneaked in and became popular because it does not require anyone to face the problems of people. It is easier to rate them, focus on the outcome. What Western industry needs is methods that will improve the outcome." And he says, "Suggestions follow." So first, institute... The first principle. "Institute education in leadership: the obligations, the principles, and methods." And so I think introduction to the System of Profound Knowledge will help. And then after profound knowledge has been sort of brought to the notice of... Of bringing to the notice of the people then you get into perhaps teaching them about 14 Points, et cetera.   0:07:57.8 Balaji Reddie: Comes the second principle. He says, "Ensure more careful selection of people in the first place." So choosing the people, he says again, now here's where it requires you to understand the purpose of what you're doing, purpose of your organization, purpose of the people you're looking out for and making this change. Because when you know your purpose, you know the aim, then you can choose people in the right way. And I believe he said this somewhere, it's a combination of education, training, skills, and experience. So we need to combine these four factors in choosing the right people. Then he says, after selection of the people, ensure better training and education. So we fine-tune all of their... He says a complete background. He said their aspirations, their goals.   0:08:54.2 Balaji Reddie: I kind of borrowed this idea from a company here in India where they had this thing called roles, responsibilities, and objectives. And they used to meet once in a month, but once in a year they used to decide. So the top management, the HR, would sit down with each and every employee and say that, "In this calendar year, this is what we intend to do and this is what we expect from you." And in turn, they used to ask the employee, "What do you expect from us? Because this is what we want from you." And then the employee had a chance of putting forth what he or she wanted, the management, what help they needed. And I think this is where we have to be... It's a give and take. And they didn't just meet once a year; every month they would meet and the question was, "How are we doing?" not "What have you done?"   0:09:51.1 Balaji Reddie: So I think it wasn't a traditional appraisal. If there was any appraisal, it was appraising what top management were doing or intended to do and not so much the employee. I thought that was a good move. So that's what we need to do here: better training and education. Principle number four states: "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

Why do more pressure, more meetings, and more accountability so often produce the same outcomes? John Dues and Andrew Stotz explore Deming's overlooked insight that results are created by systems — not effort alone. Learn why reacting to variation often makes performance worse, how leaders unintentionally create noise through "tampering," and what it takes to build improvement that actually lasts. 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 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 why reacting to results won't improve your system. John, take it away.   0:00:25.6 John Dues: Hey, Andrew. It's good to be back.   0:00:28.6 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, it has been a while.   0:00:30.5 John Dues: It has been a while. We missed a couple months for scheduling stuff, so we're fitting it in on Memorial Day here.   0:00:38.1 Andrew Stotz: Hard working. Even on a holiday.   0:00:41.1 John Dues: Even on a holiday, yep. No doubt. I stumbled across this, I'd seen this a number of times, but I thought I'd start with this quote from Deming. He would often sort of pose this simple question at his seminars. He would, you know, kind of ask the crowd, "what will it take to take an organization to unprecedented levels of quality?" And he was, you know, truth be told, he was kind of setting the crowd up because he knew inevitably someone in the crowd would say, you know, by everyone doing their best. And he would immediately respond then, "they already are, and that's the problem," right? So that's kind of the focus today. And, you know, that sort of exchange to me exposes a belief that still shapes in my world how many schools are led today, and I'm sure many businesses as well. And that is this idea that when results fall short, the instinct is to push harder, you know, respond faster, demand more from people. You know, it feels responsible, it looks decisive, but it rarely, very rarely produces better outcomes, especially on the long term. You know, in many schools, you know, leadership revolves around reviewing outcomes.   0:02:05.8 John Dues: You know, just like probably in your business, you know, we're examining test scores, attendance rates, discipline data, you know, lots of other types of indicators, and we're often comparing those results to what came before. And then we have all these meetings and we have charts and explanations and action steps. And, you know, despite all this attention, all these best efforts, results often remain unchanged.   0:02:30.3 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, it made me think about when, you know, let's just say that a tragedy happens and then everybody wants the government to tighten the laws. And then they're oftentimes responding to a short term, or let's say, normal common cause variation. And next thing you know, you have 10 laws coming down on society that nobody can untangle.   0:02:56.3 John Dues: Yeah.   0:02:56.8 Andrew Stotz: And if you were to actually stand up... And this is, I think, to me, some of the crux of what made Deming different and difficult, was that if you were to actually stand up and say, "my proposal is to do nothing."   0:03:04.0 John Dues: Yeah.   0:03:16.3 Andrew Stotz: Everybody wants action.   0:03:17.3 John Dues: Yep, everybody wants action. It's, you know, the issue is certainly not a lack of effort. You know, I mean, I see it every day, you know, leaders, educators, they work hard. The vast majority, you know, work very, very hard, which is probably the case in most businesses. And you know, in most cases people are already doing their best. And that's kind of the point, right? The issue is that the results are those outputs of those systems. You know, they're produced by the system and they can't be improved directly, the results, that is. You know, but that's what we focus on. As leaders we focus typically on results and, you know, we end up reacting to what the system produces rather than changing, you know, how that system works. And I think that's probably, if not the, one of the key lessons that, you know, Dr. Deming taught in his four-day seminars. And it's just like what you said, you know, that reaction, it feels like action, but it doesn't change, you know, the performance of the system. So, you know, over the past several months, I've argued, you know, as I've been writing about this, that leaders often respond too quickly.   0:04:32.4 John Dues: Just like what you were, you know, talking about in your example there. When the numbers change, it's so often just that common cause, that routine variation, and they don't have any tools to distinguish signal from noise. That's sort of one characterization. So, you know, what happens is these common cause patterns just remain. And when results are not where we want them to be, we just respond to the data itself, right? Instead of actually working towards the system. And we, you know, in my world, it's lots of meetings, you know, we ask... As leaders, we ask for explanations. I definitely did this before I discovered this methodology. We adjust expectations. You know, we in education are sort of notorious for new initiatives piled on old initiatives, but none of these actions, none of these things, it feels productive, but none of them are actually changing that underlying system. And I think that's really where the problem lies in my mind.   0:05:39.5 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, the concept of tampering is such an interesting one, you know, that he talks about, about tampering with a system, you know, just does more damage.   0:05:49.2 John Dues: More damage. Yeah, that's exactly right. That's kind of the irony or the paradox that you often find in the Deming philosophy is that until people actually stop and think about it, you know, if they stop long enough to consider what he was saying, then they start to sort of come around to those ideas. But we often don't slow down enough to actually do that, right? And so, you know, it begs the questions, if reacting to results is ineffective, and we've said that, you know, here before, what is it leaders should do instead? And I, you know, I think a really useful, different starting point is a question to ask yourself. And you know, that first question is, is the process that produced this observation the same as the process that produced the others, right? Is this actually something different being produced in our system or, when we really stop and think about it, is it more of the same? You know, and the answer to that question is going to dictate your next steps. But the key thing is that that question shifts attention away from the most recent data point and toward the system that generated it. You know, it forces you to look back more than just, you know, last month or last year.   0:07:07.7 John Dues: Now you're looking at what's happened the last several months, what's happened in the last several years in this system. You know, I think then if the process has not changed or the system has not changed, I kind of use those interchangeably, then what you often discover is that the results are likely consistent with what the system has been producing all along. And so in that case, which is again so often the case in a common cause system, asking for explanations or making immediate adjustments doesn't address that underlying issue. And it, just like you were saying, it's what Deming called tampering. And it actually makes things worse. All this action, all this activity, it feels good in the moment, but you're actually making things worse in your organization by overreacting or reacting to the wrong things. Now, on the other hand, if the process has changed, then there might be something to investigate, but the goal is not to explain the result, it's to understand what is different in your system. So in either case, whether it's a change or something hasn't changed, I think the key thing is the focus moves from the data to that underlying process or that underlying system.   0:08:29.4 Andrew Stotz: It's... I've been working at my coffee factory with the accounting team using the accounts receivable days and the inventory days as a measure that we can track over time. And then I've, you know, developed a pretty simplified PDSA for the team, considering they've never heard any of this stuff. And so, and then, you know, first thing we saw when we looked at the data was that the inventory days really went down a lot in December. We're like... And that was because we wrote off a lot of inventory at the end of the year that was obsolete or whatever. So there was a... And that's where I could say there is an example of a special cause. There's no sense in changing the system because of that one write-off, although that can give us some indication like, we need to be better in some other areas. But to look at that one special cause as unique wouldn't make sense.   0:09:35.7 John Dues: Yeah. And in that case, is the data point from December being produced by the same system that the other data points came from.   0:09:45.6 Andrew Stotz: It's the same system except there's an extreme adjustment to the system.   0:09:53.1 John Dues: Right.   0:09:53.3 Andrew Stotz: Which is the write off.   0:09:55.5 John Dues: Does that happen every year?   0:09:58.3 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, it's gonna happen in every business that has a warehouse and production because, you know, there's gonna be waste, there's gonna be obsolescence, there's gonna be mistakes, and you... It's just very hard to get it perfect. My first job at Pepsi was counting the inventory, basically, and I ran a team of seven people that counted the inventory every single day. And you know, you just, you know, yo