The final insight from the systems view is the role of feedback within the system. A deep and technical dive into feedback loops goes beyond the scope of this post; I’d encourage readers to check out Donella H. Meadows’ Thinking in Systems: A Primer for anyone interested in an accessible introduction to learning more about this critically important concept. However, it is worth touching on a few important points as we wrap up this series.
Read MoreContinual improvement guided by the 14 Principles is not a project or program to be implemented, but rather a never-ending commitment to quality. With that mindset framing in hand, a recap of each of the principles that have been discussed in this series follows.
Read MoreBreak down barriers between departments and grade levels and develop strategies for increasing cooperation among groups and individuals. Administrators, business & financial managers, operations staff, support staff, students, and teachers, etc. must work as a team to foresee problems in the production and use of high-quality learning experiences.
Read MoreDrive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the school system. No one can perform their best unless they feel secure to express ideas, ask questions, and make mistakes.
Read MoreLast month, I posed the following question - Do we really need to transform our education system? - and posited that any attempts at transformation needed to sit on top of a solid philosophical foundation. The purpose of this blog post is to make the case for transformation from the prevailing style of management to the philosophy developed by W. Edwards Deming across a lifetime of continual improvement work. It is on this foundation that our education system should stand rather than constantly shifting in the wind based on management mythology, the latest testing data points, and political pet projects.
Read MoreThere is variation in everything we observe and measure in schools. Knowledge about Variation provides a tool kit by which to understand this variation. Educators are inundated with data, but what’s much more difficult is knowing how to interpret and make sound decisions with it. Do this year’s state test scores indicate that our district is improving? Was last month’s drop in per pupil revenue a sign of things to come? Did attendance rates improve this week because of the intervention we put in place or was it due to something else? The ability to answer questions like these is fundamental to our ability to make improvements.
Read MoreAppreciation for a System quite literally means that we step back and see the organization we lead as a system. Dr. Deming recognized that organizations are characterized by a set of interactions among the people who work there, the tools, methods, and materials they have at their disposal, and the processes through which these people and resources join to accomplish its work. This is the essence of a system. In my experience, systems leaders fall short of this appreciation most commonly in two areas. First, we overemphasize the extent to which problems can be attributed to individual educators as opposed to the underlying system. Second, we often fail to appreciate the idea that improvement in one area of our school system can lead to a decline in performance in the system as a whole.
Read MoreLast month, I outlined why data has no meaning apart from their context. The discussion centered on some key ideas for presenting data in context as well as a logical definition of improvement. I also introduced an example of how data is often misinterpreted in the education sector. In this post, I’ll begin to lay the foundation for understanding variation in quality improvement work; this will be a precursor to comprehending why so much of the data analysis that is done in organizations is akin to writing fiction.
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Each part of the SoPK is interdependent and equal in importance. Nonetheless, if there is one of the four components that seems to flow through each of the others, it is psychology. A leader of organizational transformation must understand the psychology of individuals, the psychology of groups, the psychology of society, and the psychology of change.
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In our organizations, theory must be the basis of all investigation, and the basis for any action we take to improve systems within our organizations has to include testing our theories. The Theory of Knowledge is all about where our knowledge comes from that we use in these improvement efforts. This knowledge has temporal spread.
Read MoreIn the last written work of his long life, The New Economics, Deming had this to say about variation:
Variation there will always be, between people, in output, in service, in product. What is the variation trying to tell us about a process and about the people that work in it?
The main point that Deming was making was that outcomes are either good or bad by the time we look at them. The enemy is variation and the sources of variation in and around the process that produced the outcome. When you combine this point with the core idea of systems thinking - that most results belong to the system - you begin to see your organization through a completely new lens.
Perhaps the most radical idea put forth by Deming is the idea that any outcome we see within our system is the result of more than the skills and efforts of the individuals that work within the organization. Organizations are characterized by a set of interactions among the people who work there, the tools and materials they have at their disposal, and the processes through which these people and resources join together to accomplish its work. Central to this idea is that most of the performance differences observed between individuals are generated by the complex and dynamic system itself of which workers are only one part.
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