Management’s Job

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 recording for a couple of weeks. And he's like, "John, you really need to write a book about Dr. Deming." And then I started building a folder. And then the crash course then or the trajectory at that point not really crash course is that you realize the 14 Points are, no disrespect, but vaguely interesting. You're like, "Okay, Mount Everest is System of Profound Knowledge." Right? Because that's the mount… And that's the one where you're like, "Okay, I read 'Out of the Crisis', I think I get it, the 14 Points make sense, but like, what is this stuff he's talking about here?" Right? And then you read 'New Economics' and it's like, "I still…" And then, so for me then, it was, I'm just one of these person like I have… And again, I'm not trying to make myself look like I'm special, but I have to learn. I can't… I'm the worst person in a… If I was in your class, you'd kick me out of your class because I'd be sitting in the front row and you'd be, "Oh no, not you again."   0:09:26.2 Andrew Stotz: Another question.   0:10:26.9 John Willis: Yeah I know just another question. I mean, I've been cut off by professors and… But the… I'm like, "All right, I got to get to the bottom of this." And that was almost a 10-year journey for me of… I had to know. Because it was clear to me that Profound Knowledge or System of Profound Knowledge was not something he invented out of thin air. Like, I had to figure out, where did he get this? And that started the genesis of how I was gonna write the book, which is the journey, 'Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge'. And that sort of took me into… And what that did, while I was learning that, of course, Deming opened the door to guys like Russell Ackoff and Ashby and just all these other sort of management thinkers and even Drucker or whatever, right? They all sort of started filling out a palette. But meanwhile, I'm still driving hard on Deming. And what that gentleman said to me, good friend of mine, Ben Rockwood, who I give tribute in the book, is when he said to me, almost like tapped me on the head, like, "John, John, John, it all goes back to Deming." Like, you start seeing the clarity of DevOps, Lean, Agile, it all had these things. And so I spent literally a long time really trying to figure out, okay, how did Deming get… We all know variation is relatively simple to understand where he got that from, right? Shewhart's work and all that stuff. And I'm not trivializing the impact of what he did for it, but knowledge was interesting. And knowledge I had to go to pragmatism. You had to understand what C.I. Lewis is. And that's a book that Deming said he had to read seven times.   0:12:03.1 Andrew Stotz: He had to read it seven times…there's no hope for me.   [overlapping conversation]   0:12:05.2 John Willis: That's right. No, actually I did Tom Sawyer. I have a friend who's one of the smartest people I know. He's like, "I'll read that." And he explained it to me. But and then I read it. But so knowledge, this sort of, how do we understand? How do we know what we think we really know, right? That whole epistemology and all that. To me, this is like sort of, just give me more, right? And see more and feed me. And then system thinking was interesting, appreciation for system, because then that got me back to, okay, and there was some missing links there. And I found that one of the guys who came up with General Systems Theory, von Bertalanffy, him and yeah, Ackoff. Him and Ackoff had sat in a seminar of his like in the '40s and so there was some influence there. And there's a lot of work that's been going on in systems thinking after him. But so then I got that and then the psychology is tough, right? But so I put all that together. And then my… The thing I was telling you earlier is, when I do the research for a project like this, I read everything that there is about it. So my AI book, I read 25 books on AI, history of AI. I'm up to like 10 books on the history of quantum computing.   0:13:23.4 John Willis: With Deming, I've read every book that's been written by Deming, at least the ones that I know of, right? And one of the things I noticed, the pattern was that they all… Again, I'm just simplifying it. They all started off with a little bit about the biography, some a little longer than others, but in general, most of the book was about the management theory. And it was really a book that was being sold as a business book more than it was as a biography. And one of the things I've always loved about Michael Lewis or that sort of story of nonfiction storytelling is he tells a biography, it's a disguised biography and I thought, my God this… And as I kept compiling over the years all these great stories, you know, the Doris Quinn story, right? The woman who, she went to New Guinea and Deming… Spent the last two years of her life with Deming. I mean, most of the people that are Deming disciples didn't even know about this woman. And she spent the last two years of life traveling with him. So I met her and interviewed her. And the stories, you know Hawthorne, and there was such… It wasn't just that, I love the idea of trying to explain how he got to management theory and epistemology, how did he get to the science of variation? That's all good stuff. But I wanted the stories, and the stories were just glorious. As you enjoyed the book, right?   0:14:52.4 Andrew Stotz: Yeah.   0:14:53.3 John Willis: I think that was the fun part of not just explaining the sort of tech, if you will, but it was the, like the, oh my God, this… I've got to… I had three chapters like six years before I wrote the book.   0:15:06.9 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. Well, here's chapter 15. And you say, "Being a student of Deming, I came across an untold firsthand account of a beautiful story from one of his acolytes, a woman named Doris Quinn," who you're talking about.   0:15:20.0 John Willis: Yeah. Yeah.   0:15:20.2 Andrew Stotz: And… But the… I also had marked a section related to talking about the final days, saying…   0:15:29.7 John Willis: Yeah.   0:15:29.8 Andrew Stotz: "Doris said he was a very, very driven man. He went nonstop. I remember one time we were in Kansas City and a reporter asked him, "Dr. Deming, when are you going to retire?" And the master said, "Why would I do that?" "Well, so you can do what you want." the reporter said."   0:15:45.7 John Willis: Yeah, yeah, yeah.   0:15:46.4 Andrew Stotz: "Dr. Deming looked at him and said, "I am doing what I want."   0:15:50.2 John Willis: Yeah. You know what I love about her? There's a really good book from Amazon called 'Working Backwards'. And they tell us… The guys who wrote it were pretty high up early on in Amazon. They tell the story how if they traveled with Bezos and you didn't have a whole set of questions on the plane ride, you got in trouble. And so Doris Quinn tells that story, how she literally, she tells the story of how she traveled with him and he's like, "Doris, what other questions do you have for me?" And if she didn't have one, he'd get mad at her. He wouldn't talk to her. They'd have to wait a day because normally they'd go and have gin together. But if she didn't have questions… And some of it's in the book, some of it was in conversations had… He'd literally get mad at her and not talk to her for the rest of the day [laughter] because she didn't have any questions. You got to love that, right?   0:16:39.2 Andrew Stotz: And you also did a little follow-on about more stories that you didn't get in the book, I believe.   0:16:48.1 John Willis: Yeah. Yeah.   0:16:48.2 Andrew Stotz: Tell us about that.   0:16:50.1 John Willis: Well, so I wrote the DevOps Handbook, right? And that was a collaboration with four other authors and took us six years to write it. So my wife says, "What parts did you write?" I'm like, I don't know, man. There were a lot of parts that went in and out and moved around when you have four authors, and it was really a very techie book. So 'Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge' was really the first book where I literally… It was my book. And so I had written the book. In fact, my favorite story, and Doris Quinn is a great story, my favorite one was… It was basically called The Devil Wears Prada. And so, and Kevin… I don't think Kevin, his mother even knew this when we were talking that his grandmother literally was… I mean, I think they knew that she worked for the pre-BLS, she was a statistical mathematician and all that.   0:17:45.3 Andrew Stotz: Right.   0:17:45.4 John Willis: But after the war, she worked before she… I don't know if she met Deming, but she certainly wasn't married to him, Dr. Deming. She worked on the mail-order business was getting all these returns for women's sizing. And so whatever the pre-BLS was, Bureau of Labor Statistics, commissioned her to do a study. And she's the one who invented women's sizings. Because before, they didn't really have all the different measurements. So she ran a whole statistical study. And so today… So I use the whole story of the Anne Hathaway, the 14 is the new seven and all. So I start that off. Anyway, so I go to my publisher and my editor, who I love, she'd already knocked out a lot of stories, but this is the one where, "You're not taking this story from me. You're not… This one is not." And then she's so good, she'll be like, "John, let me ask you this. Does it fit the arc?" By this point, she understands System of Profound Knowledge, she's read my book quite a bit, and she says, "Does it fit the arc of System of Profound Knowledge?" "Uh, I hate you." And I took it out. And then she said, "Well, why don't you make a blog post out of it?" And I'm like, "Oh, no. I'm gonna make another book." And I took all the stories we cut out and I called them Profound Stories. And yeah, so…   0:19:06.6 Andrew Stotz: And for the listeners and viewers, you can get it on Kindle and then you can read the stories. And I think for the Deming community, that's one of the best parts about this whole thing, is just there's no great collection of stories that has an arc to it, as you said. So I enjoy that. I wanna also… It'd be interesting to understand how your thinking has progressed about Deming, because obviously you talk about this introduction phase where you got to know him, then you have this intense phase that you seem to have a knack for, then you write the book, you have all the excitement about that, but you're on to other things.   0:19:46.8 John Willis: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.   0:19:46.9 Andrew Stotz: And there are remnants of Deming that remain with you, but there's others that have fallen by the wayside. Maybe they're not as critical as you may have thought or… I'm just curious, how does the Deming thinking unfold in your life now?   0:19:59.7 John Willis: I… It's become sort of a fabric. So, and I wanna get back to that, but I do wanna say one thing… I'm so… Whenever somebody tells me the story that they met Deming, I have two reactions. One is the hair on my skin, my arms go up thinking, "Oh, I wish that was me." But then the other one is like, I'm sure he would have yelled at me and got mad at me. Because he would basically be like, "That's a stupid question, Mr. Willis." So I have this fantasy of which way it would go. But anyway. Yeah, the question around what do I think now? I think, so if you go back to the narrative, he… And it's hard not to be a sycophant of Deming, right? But I am a sycophant of Deming, but I try not to be. And… But even in the book, I tried not to be a sycophant, right? I went out of my way. But so when I say this, Deming was in my DNA before I even knew who he was, right? Like at Exxon, at GE Capital, the Six Sigma stuff. And again, I understand for people listening, oh, the Six Sigma went the wrong direction, but it originally was stemmed from a lot of his ideas. And so it was there. So it was sort of foundational, and he was the lighthouse to put it in… And then System of Profound Knowledge became the taxonomy for me for this stuff that was in my DNA. And so in one way, there is this thing where you move on to a new transformation. And we're in one right now. We've been in one. I've been in one for five years now, which is with the AI. And again, same thing for me is it's not about the AI, it's organizational behavior, organizational patterns, what is the sociotechnical science behind how do you do these things?   0:21:48.4 John Willis: But so you forget… I always say technology shifts are like fluorescence. People use the metaphor of like spring and winter, like AI winter, AI spring, and they've used it for other things than AI. And that's sort of like a rebirth. The fluorescence is good because it's like an energy. It's always rolling forward. It just gets a fluorescence bright glow periodically. And so what the problem with the metaphor works for me because the energy is there, and the energy are the patterns that are consistent. The fluorescence is the blinding effect. So back to like, did anything fall off the wayside with Deming? Yes, for a little bit. Because in 20… Basically I started playing with the early versions of GPT, the OpenAI models, back at version two, and that was like around 2020, right? Even before ChatGPT, right? So that whole experience before we started even thinking about what this was gonna look like at a large-scale bank was fluorescence. Like I'm not thinking anything about Deming from 2020 to 2023. In 2023, 2024, I start getting asked to come into some of my larger clients. And I'm following it too, and I'm sort of… I'm starting to become aware that this is becoming… In fact, I'm pretty sure in the grand scheme of things that don't matter in the grand scheme, I'm pretty sure I got first use on shadow AI, in an article I wrote in like 2022 or 2021, right?   0:23:27.2 John Willis: So I had already been recognizing there's a problem pattern here. We got the shadow IT with the cloud stuff, now the shadow AI, and I could see this steamrolling happening so… And then I started getting called in organizations, and then I still was the wayside of the Deming. Like, I didn't walk in going, "Hey, I'm gonna hit the punching bag with Deming." I was coming in trying to figure out what do I know about patterns with this fluorescence metaphor that are new and shiny, and what are the things that are old that have been relevant for the five decades and the six transform… At least six transformations I've been through that are common in everyone. And I started seeing that. And then what was funny, as I'd be writing and researching with AI, it knew so much about me that even as early as like 2024, I had loaded in my Deming book. In fact, one of the ways I learned AI is I took the 'Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge' and I turned it into an augmented general retrieval, or what they call RAG database. So I learned a lot about AI because I knew what my book was, and I could validate what was hallucinations.   0:24:36.3 John Willis: Anyway, but it knew enough about me. And then what it would periodically do, it would say, "Would you like Deming's version of this?" I'm like, "Yeah, I would love that." And then I… It started refreshing my memory of what the real context going back to my friend Ben Rockwood, it all goes back to Deming. And so now it's actually on the… It's more than ever, it's on the forefront because I'm being brought into major brand organizations that are seemingly failing on AI at the institutional, organizational level. And there's not a line of these people. In fact, most of them don't wanna talk to me because they don't wanna hear what I got to say, which is slow down. And I'm okay with the ones that don't wanna hear that because I don't really wanna work with them anyway. But now I'm seeing with absolute clarity two things. One is it all goes back to Deming, and all the problems that we're seeing can be classified in Profound Knowledge.   0:25:37.1 Andrew Stotz: Tell us more about that. Because for those people that… There's so many different components. When I got introduced to Deming, it was the 14 Points, 'Out of the Crisis'. And then I left America in 1992, so I wasn't there for 'New Economics'. And it… And I did other stuff for 20 years, 15 years, and then I found New Economics. It's like, "Wow, this is different from that."   0:25:53.1 John Willis: Yeah.   0:26:09.1 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, so between the deadly diseases, the 14 Points, the System of Profound Knowledge, there's so many parts to this.   0:26:15.9 John Willis: No, I've got… Yeah, I definitely got. And I'll tie it right back to the… In 'Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge', I tell the story of Knight Capital. And Knight Capital is an interesting… It was the second highest high-frequency trading, black box, latency arbitrage on the NYSE. A sysadmin made a configuration error. They lost $450 million and don't quote me on the exact numbers, but like 450 million in 45 minutes. They were arbitraged at billions of dollars. They were literally out of business with a cease and desist from the SEC. And I always tell people, like, that's the last thing you want if you have a business is a cease and desist from the SEC, right? And at that point, we would say things like the consequences are high on how you think about humans and technology. Well, guess what, sports fans? Knight Capital is a drop in the bucket of what we're gonna start seeing with AI. We are going to see these… And there's the Equifax breach, there's all the… We're gonna see non-survival. I mean, Knight Capital didn't survive. Equifax lost five billion market cap in a week and then recovered all of it, right? But I'm saying there's been some major brand recognition problems pre-AI. You're not going to be able to survive these with the power…   [overlapping conversation]   0:27:41.7 Andrew Stotz: Abilities are gonna be shaken out.   0:27:43.6 John Willis: Yeah. I mean, and the brand damage. Brand damage by the escape routes of how… I mean, let me just step and I wanna go back to answer your question. But one of the things that people don't recognize right now is the machine that we have now has infinite knowledge at machine speed, and it's probabilistic. I mean, just add those three things up, that it has the ability of infinite knowledge, something no human could even close to. So it'll make decisions, it will escape, it will figure ways out, it will try a clever way to do something that probably no human would do that could be a disaster. Right? So the consequences are incredibly high. So then now, okay, let's really dust off: it all goes back to Deming's stuff. And so to your question, I think that I would love to see, like, you write a fantasy novel about how Deming came back to the future and was sitting here listening to what was going on, and he'd be screaming. He'd be telling everybody… And this is the thing I'm… I don't scream, I'm too old these days, but like, I literally cut off a CIO real quick in my conversation. I interview a CIO, they think they're interviewing me, I'm interviewing them. And if I'm like, "Yeah, no, you know what? This isn't right." "Well, what do you mean, John? We had…" "No, no, no."   0:29:09.1 John Willis: Because I can see right away that what the CIO or the leadership is… They think AI is a technology transformation. It's an organizational learning transformation. Deming would see this and scream this out loud. And that's the part of the blinding fluorescence that we're missing. We should know this by now, right? And so all these technology shifts, they think they're technology revolutions. They're really… I mean, they go back to the basics. What are the systems are they changing? Are we understanding what variation is? How do people learn? Are people not learning? Are people… A good example is, in every organization that I travel and this has been true for almost every technology transformation, but now it's glaring. I like to simplify. I say there's three groups. Let's take AI, right? Three groups in an organization. And usually, again, I don't care about really start-ups. I do care about startups from an investment standpoint, but I don't care about them from my day job. And so this is a bank or a large retail or insurance company or manufacturing. And so the CIO is like, "We have an AI strategy." And by the way, let me step one more thing, we learned a lot in the DevOps revolution, but DevOps was never a board-level conversation and it was never a Wall Street conversation.   0:30:37.1 John Willis: AI was immediately a board-level conversation. And so the pressure on a C-level, a CEO and a CIO, is "You must do AI yesterday.", right? And so now what's happening is the CIOs are literally doing knee-jerk reactions of like, "We're gonna have… We got 30,000 employees. If we can get all 30,000 employees using AI with a 3x productivity rating, we'll have…" you know, like, oh my God. And then they say, "Make it so." And I call this the strategy versus talent systems gap. And I don't mean how talented they are, I mean understanding what your talent system looks like. And to keep it simple, most talent systems look like this, they have one group that is passive-aggressive. They don't like change. They've been doing the same job forever. In this new world, they don't believe AI works, and they're passive-aggressive about it because they know they can't say they don't want it. When the CIO says, "We must do AI." they have to go, "Oh, we'll get to it next month. Next month. We'll get to it next month." And then you have the second group in the middle. They wanna do the right thing, but they're high enough… As we know, if you work for a bank and you're in a high enough position, if something really goes wrong, you're lucky if you get fired. You could get a fine for two times your salary, or you could actually go to jail.   0:32:02.3 Andrew Stotz: Right.   0:32:02.4 John Willis: Right? So that group is like, "I wanna use this, but you're not clear. There's no clarity from your… You guys all wanna do all this…   [overlapping conversation]   0:32:11.7 Andrew Stotz: There's risks everywhere.   0:32:13.3 John Willis: But we've got the OCC and there's no clarity on FDIC and like, what does this mean?" "Well, I don't know." "Well, then I'm not touching this stuff. And do you have my back?" No. Right? And then the third group is the classic, do now, ask forgiveness later group. And so you could put this all back to driving out fear. Because what happens is you've got a strategy. What is that, it's number eight, I think. I think that's right, but it doesn't matter, right? It could be nine, it could be seven in the 14 Points. So the CIO has said, "This must happen." And then, again, board-level, horizontal, vertical pressures. And then everybody's… And they're not even understanding, do they have the capability? Do people wanna do it? Does the middle group even understand the clarity? And so the first thing that you should be doing is, in the clearest sense is driving out fear. So the do now, ask forgiveness laters are fear that if they don't do it, they won't be the leaders. The middle group is pretty clear what their fear is, you don't give them clarity of what they can and can't do. And the third group is fear of changing, losing their job, "AI is gonna replace me." So that's all a spectrum of understanding fear at the human level. And so maybe that is one of the first things you should address before you actually set a grand strategy. And we know Deming has a lot of thoughts about this, and then we break into sort of like…   0:33:48.6 Andrew Stotz: Okay, so let's stop at that.   0:33:50.1 John Willis: Yeah. Yeah.   0:33:51.6 Andrew Stotz: Fear.   0:33:53.0 John Willis: Yeah.   0:33:54.5 Andrew Stotz: That is something that remains in your belief system that is supported by Deming. Did you have that awareness when you were in… Let's just think about before you came across Deming.   0:34:08.1 John Willis: Oh, oh, yeah.   0:34:08.9 Andrew Stotz: Let's say you were doing all that stuff with Goldratt and all that but then when you came to Deming, did fear come up as, oh, wow, this is obvious, or did you learn that later and you see it now more?   0:34:21.3 John Willis: Andrew, this is why you're good at your job. This is good. This is a great question. No, really good… I love questions where I have to really deep think about it. So I think that I kind of always… It wasn't until DevOps that I understood what failing was about. So just before, like the nanosecond before I'm learning what Deming's saying about PDSA and failing and how the whole structure of learning is, I had this sense, but I don't think I was baptized yet on… And to me, I'll put fear and failure in the same bucket, right? Because it's a very… They are, in a lot of senses, the same thing. But certainly I can put them in the same bucket. So I had a sense, but it wasn't until we started seeing fast fail in DevOps. So DevOps, one of the things with DevOps was shorten the feedback loop. That was one of the core tenets of DevOps. Like, instead of waiting three, four weeks, five weeks, six weeks to deliver some software, or six months, and then by the time you deliver it, you're onto… The whole group that built it is now doing something else, let's just be able to turn a line of code into a delivery now. And that was revolutionary, right? And it's changed the universe. I mean, you don't have the big AI providers today if you didn't have DevOps.   0:35:46.4 John Willis: You would not have Airbnb and Uber and all that if you didn't have DevOps. Right? So that… And that sort of realized that this fast feedback loop is really an interesting thing, right? And the fact that it is telling you fail fast because then you learn fast and then you correct fast. And you… And so right around that time, I'm doing this research on Deming and starting to understand epistemology, the theory of knowledge. And so, again, I don't think… Like I said earlier, I don't think I had the… And vocabulary's too loose of a word. I don't think I had the structural understanding. Like, I didn't know what the word epistemology meant [laughter] before I started learning Deming. So I… So it was really… There were flavors of understanding what learning was, but it was DevOps that literally sort of put it to the front of why this works, how it does. And then I got… Again, a lot of careers is just being lucky, right? I just happened to sort of tap into this Deming thing through meeting Gene, learning about Goldratt, and then having this good friend tap me on the head and say it all goes back to Deming. And so, so and then that point, then it sort of opened up the whole world of epistemology. And it wasn't until I wrote the book where I started realizing it was pragmatism.   0:37:07.2 Andrew Stotz: And did that… Does that fail fast, does that method of accelerating the feedback loop that happened through DevOps as you've explained, does that remove a lot of fear from where people would be…   0:37:19.6 John Willis: Oh yeah.   0:37:19.7 Andrew Stotz: Much more… So that all of a sudden says, "No, no, no, it's okay to fail. We'll see that in a day, in two days, and then we're gonna iterate from that." So, okay, I understand how that kind of reframes fear of failure. But then you now talked also about the idea that it's a big element that you see, everything goes back to Deming. Nowadays you see this fear. How does it connect with how you see fear today in the workplace or in organizations?   0:37:50.6 John Willis: Well, again, I think it's the same thing. I mean, I hear people talk about now that one of the big discussions right now and I always look for the anti-pattern of where the discussions go, right? There's this big discussion about AI slop, right? In fact, last year it was we were all concerned about hallucinations. And I'm not dismissing that, but like, if you know how to run AI and infrastructure harnesses and build ground truth in an organization and you understand how your internal audit works, hallucinations are not, let me repeat this, are not a problem in 2026. They are not a problem. You could make them a problem by not understanding what I just said, but they are not a problem. So today's hallucination frenzy scare is what's called AI slop. And I guarantee you in 2027, it'll be something else. But… And I'm not saying it doesn't exist. It does exist, right? But so people are sort of calibrating, what is the cost… There's this counter-reaction to AI coding, not even assistance, people are now using pure agent coding, right? And the question that I think Deming would ask and maybe if there is some divine proxy of me speaking through Deming or Deming speaking through me is that the question that people are now looking at is, "Slop is so bad, we're creating so much code, should we ease back to the longer cycle for ideation and delivery and that process?" Because it's costing us a lot of money on the implementation side.   0:39:20.8 John Willis: The error, the time it takes to remediate the slop is starting to outweigh. Well, that's just bad organizational behavior and design. But okay, but so now I've had this argument with a major corporation, the CIO the other day, where I was saying you have to create this hourglass effect. For you got to create the funnel and then you got to have the control system that slows things down and speeds it up. And he was saying, "But yeah, the cost of the slop is all this stuff." And I said… What I said is, "Yeah, but what you're missing is…" and this is a company that did really well in DevOps, I worked with them years ago through the DevOps transformation and they understood the fast feedback and I had to re-explain the idea that, yeah, there's a cost to AI slop, but if you're not calibrating that with the cost of non-fast feedback and learning because your fear is this slop is gonna get us back or make you knee-jerk reactions, we're gonna see if we can slow down the ideation, maybe we move too fast. And again, I don't… There are scenarios where that is absolutely true, but that is, first understanding your problem. And your problem isn't slow down the ideation process.  Oh, we should spend more time ideating because what does that do? It goes back to the old school where we're spending way too much time in the ideation. By the time it actually gets implemented, the feedback loop of learning is way too long. So I think you're better off at least measuring… And this is where variation comes into play. Measuring if I decrease the ideation time, do I get more value from the fast feedback because I can understand the problem, I can fix it faster? And again, that was one of the core tenets of DevOps. But I find people now pushing back because they're scared of AI slop and it's costing more remediation time. So again, I think these are multiple ways of thinking about how fear…   [overlapping conversation]   0:41:26.9 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, so besides…   0:41:27.1 John Willis: The fear… And I was just gonna say one… Sorry to cut you off.   0:41:29.0 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, go ahead.   0:41:31.0 John Willis: But one of the biggest problems I've seen over the years is I think the knee-jerk reaction is the symptom of fear. Right? And so I've seen this over and over where a bank gets pawned and so they put out a req for a hundred IT sec professionals in a city where you can best case hire 10 one year. Right? So again, I think that there's that combinatorial fear, knee-jerk reaction.   0:42:00.5 Andrew Stotz: If you were to pick one other area of Deming that really stands the test of time for you, as opposed to a Deming disciple, let's say someone that's trying to implement everything that he's talking about and they're trying to do it in their little manufacturing company or their service business, which I interview those guys.   0:42:09.1 John Willis: Yeah, yeah.   0:42:17.6 Andrew Stotz: But in your case, in some ways it's like you swam through a Deming period of time, absorbed everything and now you're on to other stuff. I'm just kind of interested about what else is lasting?   0:42:35.2 John Willis: Yeah, no…   0:42:35.3 Andrew Stotz: Just one thing.   0:42:35.6 John Willis: And I think maybe, Andrew, maybe part of a problem of the institutionalized Deming conversations is it doesn't always have to have the word Deming in it. In other words, I'm not criticizing you. I'm just saying that I see it more as it's in my DNA. It's part of how I look at things. And so I'll give you a great example. This is pure Deming, but I wouldn't think of it as, "Oh, let me explain this way I want you to evolve in AI because Deming would say…" I don't start that way. But I will tell you that when I came up with this idea and it's called an ideation, AI ideation hackathon. Right? Because everybody's running tech hackathons, AI hackathons. And that's a terrible, terrible, terrible idea. And there's technical debt, you're just making a lot of mistakes there.   0:43:01.7 Andrew Stotz: Right.   0:43:27.8 John Willis: It's a knee-jerk reaction. So the ideation hackathon is sort of something unique. I was doing some consulting for the CMO of a large database company, but got into AI and I helped them, it's called MongoDB, I don't do any work for them anymore but I helped them launch their AI solution. And I did a lot of technical hackathons and I just kept seeing how all the chaos of these technical hackathons, people would build stuff, it would just wind up in GitHub repositories, it would go nowhere. And I finally said, "Why don't we just strip out the technology and focus on the ideation process?" Right? And so that becomes a pure implementation of PDSA. Right? Because in a PDSA, if I was gonna sort of explain it in a Deming way, a hackathon would be a terrible way to implement a PDSA. "So let's build the Sistine Chapel and then let's figure out, let's study the results." Or why don't we start small as an organization? This is why I tell my first… Right now, CIO asks me, "Okay, John…" and usually the conversation ends at this, "What would be your 30-day, 90-day plan, 180-day plan?"   0:44:41.0 John Willis: I'm like, "Not to have one." Yeah, but then I sort of, I talk about two ways to deal with where they're at. And I say that one is something I've done over years, was a qualitative. I do these large where I interview 300, 400 people and I use true qualitative analysis approach to interviewing people, build categories, and structurally design what the place looks like. Right? And that's very… But it's very expensive and it takes… Expensive not in the money, but the time. The new sort of one that CIOs, at least a small percentage of bite onto is, "Why don't we run some ideation hackathons?" And here's the value, you're not writing any code. You're letting people focus on learning how to ideate. Because remember I said earlier, AI is not a technology transformation, it's an organizational learning change. So let's focus on the organizational learning structures without giving any of the technology or the code. But do the hackathon, and the readouts are what you would have built minus the specific tools. And it's glorious because you actually you get to see all the stuff without expending tokens. You don't build the risks. Because anybody who tells you they can sandbox experiments in AI is lying, absolute lying. If anybody's followed the recent Open AI Hugging Face one, it was the most insane escape.   0:46:10.9 John Willis: So, and then the other idea is I don't want 30 of my executive administrators all picking their own tools and all trying to solve all their C-level bosses' problems. And by the way, there's the whole security exposure is, I've done ideation hackathons where an EA says, "I got this idea. I wanna take my P&L or my profit or whatever of some proprietary information on a spreadsheet and throw it into Claude and have Claude…" I'm like, "Yeah, no, no, no, no. Let me explain how that goes into Claude." It literally, it traverses through a bunch of internal structures that leave stuff laying around. And by the way, even though they say they don't train on your data, they have your data. Like, you don't want that data in there. So the ideation hackathon, I think, is a really good… And so I think the main point to that is, although I don't walk in the door and I think one of the… Again, your listeners, I'm like attacking your listeners basically but I think one of our problems is, we try to build our, some people try to build their skill set around like, "I'm a Deming expert. I'm gonna teach you how to do Deming and everything's gonna be great because of Deming." as opposed to let's just make the water Deming, the water, the fabric of what we do. And every once in a while it does make sense to be able to say, "Hey, you know that…" And I won't go back and say I won't lead and say, "Well, Deming tells us…" because I'm not gonna get the gig if I just go too much on Deming anyway. But I will say at some point, I'll say, "Here's the deal. We've got over 100 years of management knowledge on how to do the right things. Let's pay attention to those things." Right? And that's the Deming, that's the Shewhart, that's the Ackoff, it's the Ashby, it's the… We can go down the list, right? Senge.   0:48:06.2 Andrew Stotz: One of the things I was thinking about a while ago was, when Dr. Deming wrote 'Out of the Crisis', he was telling us that we were in a crisis and that we needed to think a new level of thinking. Did it work? Are we out of the crisis? Did people take on board what he taught? Where are we now? That was 1986.   0:48:30.7 John Willis: Yeah, I know, I know.   0:48:31.7 Andrew Stotz: On the one side you can say America's brought incredible amount of innovation and businesses are huge and other countries and other regions struggle to catch up with America. So on the one hand, you could say materially it appears like we're there. But on the other hand, when you look at the way things are managed, you could argue, yeah, not much has changed.   0:48:56.7 John Willis: It's a tough one. It's a tough, I mean, let's just face it, large-scale organizations of high consequences are so full of bureaucracy. Humans interacting at that scale is probably the hardest organizational problem there is, right? You can study anthropology for the next 40 or 50 years and still not have a good clue of how to. And people do, right? So, yeah, it's hard. And why things work, why they go through the… I mean, I talk about the Peterson at Ford, right? And then Ford, turns out there were a lot of other… There are these other conflicting things that happen, industry changes, financial models change. Why did Ford have this incredible success when Peterson called Deming? And then some number of years later, they're back to the old ways, right? We got General Motors, we got all that. I will say this, and I hadn't really thought about this until you asked the question. One of the things I did focus pretty heavy on is Deming's influence on Toyota. And now there's a lot of debate and this is where people get pretty mean with me. I mean, Dr. Spear, I love Dr. Spear. He wrote 'High Velocity Edge' and he's a genius. He was MIT Sloan. And every time I'd see him, "Well, you know, John, Deming and that Six Sigma stuff never worked." And I'm like, "Alright, first off, he didn't do Six Sigma. Second off…"   0:50:21.6 John Willis: And then he told me one time, he said that Deming had no influence on Toyota. I'm like, "Yeah, that's just not blatantly untrue. I'm sorry, you're a PhD genius, I'm not. You're wrong." And so I've been hitting him… Over the years, I hit him with a lot of evidence of Deming's influence on Toyota. And it even goes back to Denco Densco and some of the same. But here's the thing, right? I… There's a woman called Katie Anderson. She's got a book, Learning to… 'Leading to Learn, Learning to Lead', where she met a guy who spent four decades at Toyota, this Dr. Yoshino, and she interviewed and wrote a book about his career. She runs a Japan study trip. I did a Japan study trip a couple of years ago and I got to meet him. And I… He hired at Toyota in 1966. He worked alongside Ohno, Shingo. He was there. He was a junior guy, but he was the guy they were yelling at, "Do this, do that, do this." right? So he was there.   0:51:23.9 John Willis: I told him, I said, "There are people that believe in the US that Deming had no influence on Toyota." He could not believe that that question even could come up. And he told me, he said, "John…", he doesn't really speak good English, we had a translator, he said, "Let me tell you what Deming taught us. He taught us to understand data." And at first I didn't grok that, but then I started thinking about variation. And although there's a lot of people that say that that didn't carry through too, but if I look at what Agile, Lean, and ultimately become DevOps, I in that book trace it pretty strongly back to Deming's influence on Toyota. And you can't deny Lean is not the core of Agile Lean, today's Lean, right? Toyota Production Systems, to be clear. So then I would say that the lasting impact of Deming is not what happened in the '80s when the Americans started understanding what he did, because maybe that translation, maybe it had to be… I asked Doris Quinn this and she said, "Oh, that's interesting." Because I said this, I said, "Could it be that Japan influenced Deming as much as he influenced Japan?" And I think it did. And I think the point was they were…   0:52:45.6 Andrew Stotz: It was a love affair.   0:52:46.3 John Willis: And yeah, and they were more malleable to his messaging.   0:52:50.3 Andrew Stotz: Well, they were more malleable because of their condition, but they also were more susceptible because of the structure of the society.   0:53:01.6 John Willis: Exactly. Yeah, but even the sort of community structure. I'll tell you another quick story on that study trip where we visited an elementary school. And in the elementary school, they had no janitors. Every sort of public school is like this, right? They have no janitors. And the kids, they literally clean. At about 2 o'clock, a bell goes off and some kids rotate and they do the bathrooms, some people… Imagine in an American school, some ritzy parents, "My son cleaned the bathroom?" It'd be on CNN. And they rotated serving food.   0:53:20.7 Andrew Stotz: Child slave labor.   0:53:39.7 John Willis: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then we got to interview a couple of them and they understood Kaizen and all. So me, I start thinking about like, oh my God, this is our… Western culture is so broken because we basically teach everything that's antithetical to that. They get out of college and then maybe they get lucky and get into an Agile, Lean-like structure and we have to break it all down, where their kids come out completely in that sort of community. And we went to a lot of tier-one distributors. You could see the understanding of community and the power of it. And so what I'm saying is, what Deming was giving them saturated to have such an impact on TPS, and it's unquestionable the impact TPS has had on Lean and Agile and DevOps. And if you follow my thread, Lean, Agile, and DevOps have certainly impacted… You don't have places like Google for good or bad, Facebook for good or bad, Uber, because they could never scale…   0:54:40.0 Andrew Stotz: Yeah.   0:54:40.1 John Willis: Without that. So again, I think, I really hadn't thought about this until you asked the question, is I think actually the Deming 1980s renaissance of Deming was a… Seemed like a bubble in retrospect, unfortunately. But actually indirectly, he's had more… And there's a good part of the book that tries to cover that. I do the "What would Deming do?" after he died, if he was alive and all the stuff that happened there.   0:55:06.3 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, I mean, definitely DevOps. And then Eric… What was his… The Lean Startup one?   0:55:14.0 John Willis: Eric Ries. Yeah, Eric Ries. Yeah.   0:55:17.3 Andrew Stotz: That also… Those two really probably did more to promote PDSA and that aspect.   0:55:23.4 John Willis: Yeah, that's right. Oh yeah, scientific method. There is a copy, and I cannot find it anywhere, there is a copy of Eric, one of Eric Ries' Lean Startup books that does attribute to Deming, and I cannot find it.   0:55:36.5 Andrew Stotz: It does or does not?   0:55:38.7 John Willis: Does. Does. He's got this thing about the 75th birthday or something. Do you have it? Because I can't find the copy, at some point I read a copy where he does a tribute to Deming.   0:55:50.0 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, I think there's some…   0:55:53.0 John Willis: And then…   0:55:53.1 Andrew Stotz: I have the book and I think there is some reference in the book.   0:55:57.5 John Willis: Yeah, there was one, was like… It was like… I don't know if it was the 70th year, 75th year, and he… So yeah, no, I mean that directly. Lean Startup is literally… Yeah, so yeah.   0:56:10.9 Andrew Stotz: And if we think about people that are listening to this podcast, the people that I really want to listen to this podcast and I really want to get something out of the podcast is people that just don't know Deming. They've never heard of it, but they've stumbled upon it. One of the Deming community said, "Hey, you should listen to this podcast because you'll learn about Deming." And maybe they listen to a couple of episodes and it's a bit overwhelming when they hear someone talking about a lot of detail about this or that. Maybe they bought 'Out of the Crisis' and they got a chapter or two into it and they thought, yeah, that's also a bit overwhelming. What would be your message to that person who's listening right now to say, here's the reason why you shouldn't abandon it because of XYZ or whatever that message is that you've got about what they need to know about Deming?   0:57:01.4 John Willis: Yeah. I mean, I will say this, learning is hard. Change is hard, right? I mean, it sounds cliché, but, yeah, I think all of us who came into Deming, I didn't… When I read, we talked about this, I read 'Out of the Crisis', I was like, I don't know what's going on here. One of the worst things I can advise you to, I hate to say this, and this is probably anti-Deming Institute, is start off by reading his two books. You're better off going out to podcasts like this or other stories. I found that healthcare was chock-full of great stories, particularly about Profound Knowledge, of great examples. And then I went back and read the book and then like, oh my God, this is, now I get it, right? So I think a lot of things that we sort of encounter, a lot of them have… The things that are really valuable have this sort of facing counter-intuitiveness nature to them, and you have to sort of work at that.   0:57:55.9 Andrew Stotz: Yeah.   0:57:56.9 John Willis: And so Deming is hard. I mean, you… If you wanna understand Deming, I would say most people are not gonna get it on the snap. And what I would say to them is, it's worth figuring out what are the parts that he says and he did and his philosophy that could become part of your DNA, 'cause that I don't think anybody disagrees on. And then… And one other sort of short story. And I love Bill Bellows and I would say listen to all his podcasts. He's an amazing guy and just incredibly insightful on a lot of, I didn't really understand Taguchi, but so I did some podcasts with him. But I remember, and I'm not calling anybody out, but he runs the In2:InThinking Group and I've been to a couple of those. And I remember one time we were sitting there and we were having a conversation around sort of a roundtable and somebody asked, as I was talking about a company, they said, "Are they a Deming company?" I'm like, yeah. And I couldn't actually get through the room that, no. Nobody's a Deming company. Like, what is a Deming company? That's the wrong question. So again, back to, you got to be careful about how you think about Deming as using his philosophy to help organizations, because the more you focus on that it is a "Deming philosophy" as opposed to these are the right ways to think about the problems, you fall into this trap of maybe getting lost. Well, that Deming thing worked for about a year or two years and now it doesn't work. Well, if you don't call it a Deming thing, then what were the things that stuck and what are the things that didn't?   0:59:42.5 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. I just wanna remind the listeners and the viewers out there, just go to Amazon and find 'Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge'. For me, I listened to it as an Audible book, which was fun because I enjoyed the stories and it just reminded me to go back and listen again. And also the additional stories, which I actually hadn't bought until, I had been wanting to buy it, but I didn't. So while you were talking, I got that on Kindle. So that's gonna be my fun.   1:00:13.9 John Willis: Those are great stories. There's a story about Gene Cernan. He was the last guy to land, be on the moon. And as you go through the book, it's really interesting. I did like seven or eight… So I was in no rush to publish the Deming book. I was in a rush to do the AI book. So I would literally get to the third rev, the fourth rev, and every time I'd have more new friends point things out. And by the time I got to like eight revs and I'm like, okay, it's probably time to put this book out. But what happens is as you go with the editor, they just start carving things down. And a good editor makes the strong point, like my 'Devil Wears Prada'. But again, there were so many great stories, like the Gene Cernan one is the last guy to be on the moon, but there was a story about Tracy's Rock and it's just a fabulous story, but it didn't have any place in Deming's Journey of Profound Knowledge. It was just an add-on that sort of took you off course. But now, in a standalone book, it's a great story. So there's a ton of those. The guy who created Piggly Wiggly was this genius. Like, again, it didn't really fit in there. But as a standalone story and I even do a little bit of, like, this would have been in chapter 15, so if you read both, you get a sense. And the worst thing I can tell you, though, is I had one person, I was at a conference I was laying the book, the Profound Stories book was laying around, and I guess I came back, he was at a booth, and he read it, and he goes, "John, can I talk to you about your book?" I'm like, "What?" He goes, "I don't know." I'm like, "Oh, dude, you can't read that book without reading 'Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge'. It would be a terrible book if you didn't know what the premise was for where it came from." So, yeah.   1:01:59.7 Andrew Stotz: So in wrapping up, what would you like to leave the audience with from this discussion and from your journey into the teachings of Dr. Deming?   1:02:11.3 John Willis: Yeah, I think you have to start thinking about… And again, I know it sounds like I'm trying to sell the book and you're doing a better job than I am anyway but the last third of 'Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge' was what would Deming do had he survived another 20 years? Right? And probably nothing because he was pretty old and not healthy. But the… So, I mean, question then is, as we think about organizational behavior, what are the core things? And I think Profound Knowledge is a great way. I, again I… Again, I don't walk in and say, "Oh, we're gonna… CIO, we're gonna solve this problem by applying the four elements of Profound Knowledge." That's not how I start that conversation. But I'm certainly thinking about systems thinking because that's first and forefront. Like, how are you thinking about… Like one company recently I was with, they got… Some of the big AI providers are giving well-branded companies all-you-can-eat AI. Like OpenAI is saying, "Hey, you know…" That's a terrible idea, terrible, terrible. Because now you're just building technical debt up the gazoo, right? So again, to be able to see the forest behind the trees, what's the systems thinking effect of that? How are you learning? What's the epistemology, the theory of knowledge behind that?   1:03:39.2 John Willis: Are you applying… In the book, I tried to codify my understanding of, like, the theory of knowledge is, how do we know what we think we know? The variation is, how can we see what we think we know? The psychology is, what are the… Let's take a second and what are the blind spots? And then I think of it as a feedback loop is, are we continually like if you listen to Bill Bellows, he does a great job of sort of explaining systems thinking through the sort of vehicle of Taguchi or Ackoff but are we just continually looping through that process as, "Let's take a bigger chunk, let's take a bigger chunk, let's take a bigger chunk"? So Profound Knowledge, not so much that you have to walk in and be an expert on 'Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge', or more specifically, The System of Profound Knowledge. The idea is, can you use those… And the reason I fell in with 'The System of Profound Knowledge', why that was what hit my core, because I will say, out of my five decades of doing all this crazy stuff in technology, I can't think… I mean, there's a lot of cool frameworks that I use as auxiliary, and frameworks I'm using loosely but The System of Profound Knowledge is the one framework that to me beats all other frameworks because it covers epistemology, it covers understanding statistical analysis or analytical statistics. Right? Which is very important. It brings in the biases, the… All the sort of things about how people think, blind spots, and then it throws together the wrapper of appreciation of a system, so…   1:05:23.2 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. Well, John, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, now you see your picture on the cover.   [laughter]   1:05:32.2 John Willis: There we go, man.   1:05:33.7 Andrew Stotz: I wanna thank you. It's a great discussion and it's long overdue.   1:05:37.7 John Willis: Sure.   1:05:37.9 Andrew Stotz: And for listeners, remember to go to deming.org and jump into DemingNext to continue your journey. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, which is, "People are entitled to joy in work."   1:05:42.4 John Willis: I love that you end with that.