Common management myths (see here and here) must be replaced by sound guiding principles. In this post, I’ll describe the fifth such principle, Work Continually on the System. It is worth noting that the 14 Principles for Educational Systems Transformation are mutually supporting, so it is important to understand all of them rather than studying them in isolation. An in-depth discussion of the full set of Principles for Transformation can be found in Chapter 3 of my recently released book Win-Win: W. Edwards Deming, the System of Profound Knowledge, and the Science of Improving Schools.

Principle 5: Improve constantly and forever the system of planning, teaching, learning, and service to improve every process and activity in the organization and to improve quality and productivity. It is management's obligation to work continually on the system (school design, curriculum, incoming supplies and materials, technology, supervision, training, retraining, etc.).

Principle 1 and 5 are very similar in that they both talk about improvement of the system and its processes over the long term. The distinction is that Principle 1 (constancy of purpose) facilitates Principle 5 (continual improvement of systems and processes). A key idea to keep front of mind is that quality must be built in at the planning and design stage of the work. For example, when a school system selects a curriculum, this selection will have downstream effects on teacher lessons and student learning. How many individual teachers selected their district’s curriculum? That’s a number that is close to, if not, 0. There are many other components to education systems that are analogous, which is why it’s management’s obligation to continually improve the system. 

Management must be able to deal with the day-to-day issues of the organization while also moving toward continual improvement. While putting out fires is important, it does not result in improvement. Similarly, detection and removal of a special cause does not improve a process. At best, fighting fires and detecting special causes returns a process back to its previous state. This means that systems leaders must strive to make unstable processes stable and to make stable but incapable processes capable, and to make capable processes ever more capable.[1]  

While problems are opportunities for improvement, a commitment to never-ending improvement can be daunting. Fortunately, there are a number of methods and tools that can be deployed by improvement teams such as the process behavior chart. It allows us to differentiate between common and special causes in our data as well help us determine the capability, variation, and stability of the process under study. This and other methods and tools such as the Plan-Do-Study-Act Cycle will help educational leaders with the implementation of the 14 Principles.

Blog Series: 14 Principles for Educational Systems Transformation

The four components of the System of Profound Knowledge work in concert to provide us with profound insights about how our organizations operate so that leaders can in turn work to optimize the whole of our systems. However, there is a step beyond simply avoiding the management myths. The next step is to be able to think and make decisions using the lens provided by the System of Profound Knowledge. This is where the core set of 14 Principles come into play. In this series, I’m describing the principles that will enable you to move from theory to practice with the Deming philosophy.

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John A. Dues is the Chief Learning Officer for United Schools Network, a nonprofit charter management organization that supports four public charter schools in Columbus, Ohio. He is also the author of the newly released book Win-Win: W. Edwards Deming, the System of Profound Knowledge, and the Science of Improving Schools. Send feedback to jdues@unitedschoolsnetwork.org. 

Notes

1. Henry R. Neave, The Deming Dimension (Knoxville, Tennessee: SPC Press, 1990), 42.