Worker’s Rights: The Bedrock of True Quality Management – A May Day Reflection

As we celebrate International Workers’ Day this May 1st, it is an opportune moment to reflect on the profound connection between workers’ rights and effective quality management. The pursuit of quality cannot be separated from how we treat, empower, and respect the rights of those who create that quality daily. Today’s post examines this critical relationship, drawing from the principles I’ve advocated throughout my blog, and challenges us to reimagine quality management as fundamentally worker-centered.

The Historical Connection Between Workers’ Rights and Quality

International Workers’ Day commemorates the historic struggles and gains made by workers and the labor movement. This celebration reminds us that the evolution of quality management has paralleled the fight for workers’ rights. Quality is inherently a progressive endeavor, fundamentally anti-Taylorist in nature. Frederick Taylor’s scientific management approach reduced workers to interchangeable parts in a machine, stripping them of autonomy and creativity – precisely the opposite of what modern quality management demands.

The quality movement, from Deming onwards, has recognized that treating workers as mere cogs undermines the very foundations of quality. When we champion human rights and center those whose rights are challenged, we’re not engaging in politics separate from quality – we’re acknowledging the fundamental truth that quality cannot exist without empowered, respected workers.

Driving Out Fear: The Essential Quality Right

“No one can put in his best performance unless he feels secure,” wrote Deming thirty-five years ago. Yet today, fear remains ubiquitous in corporate culture, undermining the very quality we seek to create. As quality professionals, we must confront this reality at every opportunity.

Fear in the workplace manifests in multiple ways, each destructive to quality:

Source of Fear	Description	Impact on Quality
Competition	Managers often view anxiety generated by competition between co-workers as positive, encouraging competition for scarce resources, power, and status	Undermines collaboration necessary for system-wide quality improvements
“Us and Them” Culture	Silos proliferate, creating barriers between staff and supervisors	Prevents holistic quality approaches that span departmental boundaries
Blame Culture	Focus on finding fault rather than improving systems, often centered around the concept of “human error”	Discourages reporting of issues, driving quality problems underground

When workers operate in fear, quality inevitably suffers. They hide mistakes rather than report them, avoid innovation for fear of failure, and focus on protecting themselves rather than improving systems. Driving out fear isn’t just humane – it’s essential for quality.

Key Worker Rights in Quality Management

Quality management systems that respect workers’ rights create environments where quality can flourish. Based on workplace investigation principles, these rights extend naturally to all quality processes.

The Right to Information

In any quality system, clarity is essential. Workers have the right to understand quality requirements, the rationale behind procedures, and how their work contributes to the overall quality system. Transparency sets the stage for collaboration, where everyone works toward a common quality goal with full understanding.

The Right to Confidentiality and Non-Retaliation

Workers must feel safe reporting quality issues without fear of punishment. This means protecting their confidentiality when appropriate and establishing clear non-retaliation policies. One of the pillars of workplace equity is ensuring that employees are shielded from retaliation when they raise concerns, reinforcing a commitment to a culture where individuals can voice quality issues without fear.

The Right to Participation and Representation

The Who-What Matrix is a powerful tool to ensure the right people are involved in quality processes. By including a wider set of people, this approach creates trust, commitment, and a sense of procedural justice-all essential for quality success. Workers deserve representation in decisions that affect their ability to produce quality work.

Worker Empowerment: The Foundation of Quality Culture

Empowerment is not just a nice-to-have; it’s a foundational element of any true quality culture. When workers are entrusted with authority to make decisions, initiate actions, and take responsibility for outcomes, both job satisfaction and quality improve. Unfortunately, empowerment rhetoric is sometimes misused within quality frameworks like TQM, Lean, and Six Sigma to justify increased work demands rather than genuinely empowering workers.

The concept of empowerment has its roots in social movements, including civil rights and women’s rights, where it described the process of gaining autonomy and self-determination for marginalized groups. In quality management, this translates to giving workers real authority to improve processes and address quality issues.

Mary Parker Follett’s Approach to Quality Through Autonomy

Follett emphasized giving workers autonomy to complete their jobs effectively, believing that when workers have freedom, they become happier, more productive, and more engaged. Her “power with” principle suggests that power should be shared broadly rather than concentrated, fostering a collaborative environment where quality can thrive.

Rejecting the Great Man Fallacy

Quality regulations often fall into the trap of the “Great Man Fallacy” – the misguided notion that one person through education, experience, and authority can ensure product safety, efficacy, and quality. This approach is fundamentally flawed.

People only perform successfully when they operate within well-built systems. Process drives success by leveraging the right people at the right time making the right decisions with the right information. No single person can ensure quality, and thinking otherwise sets up both individuals and systems for failure.

Instead, we need to build processes that leverage teams, democratize decisions, and drive reliable results. This approach aligns perfectly with respecting workers’ rights and empowering them as quality partners rather than subjects of quality control.

Quality Management as a Program: Centering Workers’ Rights

Quality needs to be managed as a program, walking a delicate line between long-term goals, short-term objectives, and day-to-day operations. As quality professionals, we must integrate workers’ rights into this program approach.

The challenges facing quality today-from hyperautomation to shifting customer expectations-can only be addressed through worker empowerment. Consider how these challenges demand a worker-centered approach:

Challenge	Impact on Quality Management	Worker-Centered Approach
Advanced Analytics	Requires holistic data analysis and application	Develop talent strategies that upskill workers rather than replacing them
Hyper-Automation	Tasks previously done by humans being automated	Involve workers in automation decisions; focus on how automation can enhance rather than replace human work
Virtualization of Work	Rethinking how quality is executed in digital environments	Ensure workers have input on how virtual quality processes are designed
Shift to Resilient Operations	Need to adapt to changing risk levels in real-time	Enable employees to make faster decisions by building quality-informed judgment
Digitally Native Workforce	Changed expectations for how work is managed	Connect quality to values employees care about: autonomy, innovation, social issues

To meet these challenges, we must shift from viewing quality as a function to quality as an interdisciplinary, participatory process. We need to break down silos and build autonomy, encouraging personal buy-in through participatory quality management.

May Day as a Reminder of Our Quality Mission

As International Workers’ Day approaches, I’m reminded that our quality mission is inseparable from our commitment to workers’ rights. This May Day, I encourage all quality professionals to:

Evaluate how your quality systems either support or undermine workers’ rights
Identify and eliminate sources of fear in your quality processes
Create mechanisms for meaningful worker participation in quality decisions
Reject hierarchical quality models in favor of democratic, empowering approaches
Recognize that centering workers’ rights isn’t just ethical-it’s essential for quality

Quality management without respect for workers’ rights is not just morally questionable-it’s ineffective. The future of quality lies in approaches that are predictive, connected, flexible, and embedded. These can only be achieved when workers are treated as valued partners with protected rights and real authority.

This May Day, let’s renew our commitment to driving out fear, empowering workers, and building quality systems that respect the dignity and rights of every person who contributes to them. In doing so, we honor not just the historical struggles of workers, but also the true spirit of quality that puts people at its center.

What steps will you take this International Workers’ Day to strengthen the connection between workers’ rights and quality in your organization?

Quality, Decision Making and Putting the Human First

Quality stands in a position, sometimes uniquely in an organization, of engaging with stakeholders to understand what objectives and unique positions the organization needs to assume, and the choices that are making in order to achieve such objectives and positions.

The effectiveness of the team in making good decisions by picking the right choices depends on their ability of analyzing a problem and generating alternatives. As I discussed in my post “Design Lifecycle within PDCA – Planning” experimentation plays a critical part of the decision making process. When designing the solution we always consider:

Always include a “do nothing” option: Not every decision or problem demands an action. Sometimes, the best way is to do nothing.
How do you know what you think you know? This should be a question everyone is comfortable asking. It allows people to check assumptions and to question claims that, while convenient, are not based on any kind of data, firsthand knowledge, or research.
Ask tough questions! Be direct and honest. Push hard to get to the core of what the options look like.
Have a dissenting option. It is critical to include unpopular but reasonable options. Make sure to include opinions or choices you personally don’t like, but for which good arguments can be made. This keeps you honest and gives anyone who see the pros/cons list a chance to convince you into making a better decision than the one you might have arrived at on your own.
Consider hybrid choices. Sometimes it’s possible to take an attribute of one choice and add it to another. Like exploratory design, there are always interesting combinations in decision making. This can explode the number of choices, which can slow things down and create more complexity than you need. Watch for the zone of indifference (options that are not perceived as making any difference or adding any value) and don’t waste time in it.
Include all relevant perspectives. Consider if this decision impacts more than just the area the problem is identified in. How does it impact other processes? Systems?

A struggle every organization has is how to think through problems in a truly innovative way. Installing new processes into an old bureaucracy will only replace one form of control with another. We need to rethink the very matter of control and what it looks like within an organization. It is not about change management, on it sown change management will just shift the patterns of the past. To truly transform we need a new way of thinking.

One of my favorite books on just how to do this is Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them by Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini. In this book, the authors advocate that business must become more fundamentally human first. The idea of human ability and how to cultivate and unleash it is an underlying premise of this book.

it’s possible to capture the benefits of bureaucracy—control, consistency, and coordination—while avoiding the penalties—inflexibility, mediocrity, and apathy.
Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini, Humanocracy, p. 15

The above quote really encapsulates the heart of this book, and why I think it is such a pivotal read for my peers. This books takes the core question of a bureaurcacy is “How do we get human beings to better serve the organization?”. The issue at the heart of humanocracy becomes: “What sort of organization elicits and merits the best that human beings can give?” Seems a simple swap, but the implications are profound.

Bureaucracy versus Humanocracy. Source: Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini, *Humanocracy*, p. 48

I would hope you, like me, see the promise of many of the central tenets of Quality Management, not least Deming’s 8th point. The very real tendency of quality to devolve to pointless bureaucracy is something we should always be looking to combat.

Humanocracy’s central point is that by truly putting the employee first in our organizations we drive a human-centered organization that powers and thrives on innovation. Humanocracy is particularly relevant as organizations seek to be more resilient, agile, adaptive, innovative, customer centric etc. Leaders pursuing such goals seek to install systems like agile, devops, flexible teams etc. They will fail, because people are not processes. Resiliency, agility, efficiency, are not new programming codes for people. These goals require more than new rules or a corporate initiative. Agility, resilience, etc. are behaviors, attitudes, ways of thinking that can only work when you change the deep ‘systems and assumptions’ within an organization. This book discusses those deeper changes.

Humanocracy lays out seven tips for success in experimentation. I find they align nicely with Kotter’s 8 change accelerators.

Humanocracy’s Tip	Kotter’s Accelerator
Keep it Simple	Generate (and celebrate) short-term wins
Use Volunteers	Enlist a volunteer army
Make it Fun	Sustain Acceleration
Start in your own backyard	Form a change vision and strategic initiatives
Run the new parallel with the old	Enable action by removing barriers
Refine and Retest	Sustain acceleration
Stay loyal to the problem	Create a Sense of Urgency around a Big Opportunity

Comparison to Kotter’s Eight Accelerators for Change

Management’s Job

In episode 48 of the Deming Len’s podcast, the host refers back to Deming’s last interview, “Dr. Deming: ‘Management Today Does Not Know What Its Job Is‘”

Fitness Matters: A Deming Success Story (Part 3) – In Their Own Words

How do you design a team off-site that actually improves your organization? In this episode, Travis Timmons breaks down the mechanics of a Deming-styled off-site team meeting—from starting months early and setting a clear aim to using pre-work, fishbone diagrams, and PDSAs to drive real change. If you want a real-world example of how Deming leaders create focus, collaboration, and joy in work, this conversation is a practical place to start. 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 discussions with Travis Timmons, who is the founder and owner of Fitness Matters, an Ohio-based practice specializing in the integration of physical therapy and personalized wellness. For 13 years, he's built his business on Dr. Deming's teachings. His hope is simple; the more companies that bring joy to work through Deming's principles, the more likely his kids will one day work at one of those darn companies. Travis, how are you doing? 0:00:35.2 Travis Timmons: Hey, Andrew. Doing well, how are you? 0:00:37.1 Andrew Stotz: I'm really excited. We were just talking about the structure of today's discussion, and the topic for today is the mechanics of a Deming-styled offsite, which I… In today's session, we're going to be talking about the importance of starting early, setting an aim, figuring out and developing an agenda. Also homework, huh? 0:01:05.1 Travis Timmons: Right. 0:01:05.4 Andrew Stotz: Pre-work for attendees. I thought that's interesting as we were going through it. And then you talk about your activities, your outcomes and all of that. So why don't you get into it and walk us through the mechanics of a Deming-styled offsite. And by the way, one last thing. When we say Deming-styled, well, you're certainly getting a lot of support from a true Deming advocate, Kelly Allen, and your understanding of the teachings of Dr. Deming. And so you're doing your best to apply those things in this. Is it a perfect Deming offsite? Well, that's why we say Deming-styled offsite. Maybe the listener or the viewer would add in or subtract some things, but at least we've got the general structures. So why don't you take it away, Travis? 0:01:47.3 Travis Timmons: Yeah, no, happy to, Andrew. So yeah, we have our team offsite. It'll actually be 10 days from now. So from a big picture standpoint, one of the things I've learned is systems, process, organization, and none of that happens quickly. So every time we do an annual team offsite, it's about a three-month work-ahead process for myself and the leadership team. So we start a good three months before the meeting date just to start percolating on what do we need to talk about at this meeting? What's the aim? What do we want the outcome to be? And that doesn't happen with a week of preparation. So we've had to spend some time looking at our KPIs, where do we have an opportunity to have a positive impact on our system? So we have to study our current system, see where there might be opportunities for improvement, understand how do we want the team to engage with that. And for this year's offsite, our big aim… We have two aims for the offsite. One is to make the system visible. Everybody on the team. I've had some learnings through some newer leaders on our team that have been through the DemingNEXT and they've been on our team for a few years. 0:03:04.1 Travis Timmons: But they until going through the DemingNEXT, they didn't fully understand what system view meant. And that kind of hit me over the head like a ton of bricks. It's like, well, maybe that would be a good thing to spend part of our offsite making sure the entire team can visualize and see our organization as a system. And then the second aim from a mechanics, from a KPI standpoint, if you will, is we want to improve arrival rate for our visits. So basically, how many scheduled appointments show up is what we call arrival rate. To have a better impact on patient outcomes, joy in work for our team members, joy in the referral sources that send to us. So yeah, it was about a three-month process. 0:03:49.3 Andrew Stotz: And if I… Just curious, sometimes when I've done offsites or I've attended offsites, it's more general. Here you have a very specific thing, improve arrival rates. Why is it so specific and how do you come to that decision that this isn't going to be just an open discussion about things in our company? 0:04:14.4 Travis Timmons: Yeah. That's a great question. Some years they are a little more general. Like last year we spent quite a bit of time setting a new round of BHAGs, Big Hairy Audacious Goals. This year, looking at KPIs, looking at where the opportunities were to improve, where there were the most breakdowns and frustrations happening in our system that we were hearing consistently across our team. It's like, what's the one thing we can have an impact on that will, if we improve that, everything else will get better. And that was arrival rate. So then we started looking at, all right, how do we dissect that? How do we make it visible to the team so the entire team can work on it together? So that's how we came to that. And it's like, all right, this is a consistent issue. So if you do the control chart, it's like I can almost set my watch to what's arrival rate going to be every week. And until we change something in our system, that's going to be what's going to continue to happen and we need to have an impact on that this year. So that's how we came down to it. It's the one thing we can do that'll have the most impact positively across the entire organization. 0:05:23.1 Andrew Stotz: I often talk about a big company in Thailand that was a Deming-focused company for many, many years, and then a new CEO came in and he made it a different focus company. And the company struggled for years. Whether it's from that or not is a secondary item. But two weeks ago I was giving a lecture and a guy from that company, who is an older guy, was at the lecture. And afterwards we were talking and I said, "What's the difference between the prior guy and the new guy?" He said, "The prior guy set the direction and we all knew it. The new guy kind of has us set it or we go in a lot of different directions. It's not as clear." And so what I was thinking when you were talking about improve arrival rates, I was thinking, yeah, that's leadership. You've identified what you believe is the most critical element at this stage of the business right now, and there's a lot of knock-on effects of fixing that. Whereas if you went into that room and you say, "What's the biggest problem we have right now?" 0:06:35.6 Travis Timmons: Right. 0:06:36.3 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, you're going to get a long list, but as a leader you have to set the direction. 0:06:41.1 Travis Timmons: Yeah. Yeah, and with the leadership team as well. And yeah, where do we… The KPIs and the system, if you study it and look at the outputs through the Deming lenses, it becomes… It's not easy. You got to spend the work and have the tools in place and the discipline to track it all consistently so that you know what your true arrival rate is. I can get in… It's a whole probably different conversation, but tampering and all that kind of stuff. So we know what our data is because of how we've made very clear definitions on our arrival rate and how we don't tamper to get better numbers. But yeah, it's exciting. The team, as crazy as this might sound, we've done these for many years now, over a decade, and the team looks forward to them. And part of that is because we spend the time. I take this very seriously. If I'm going to ask people to come to a meeting for five hours, it better be good. And we better bring… We better have something we can work on as a team to come out of it. And if we don't, that's nobody's fault but mine. So that ownership of the system I take very seriously. 0:07:58.1 Andrew Stotz: A great song, by the way, by Led Zeppelin, Nobody's Fault But Mine. But I would also say that's why I think it's fascinating to continue to go through the structure that you've got, because I think it can guide all of us. So we've learned about starting three months early. I was also thinking about my Crock-Pot. I like to cook slow-cooking food and I put all these different tastes of an onion and a piece of meat, which doesn't really have taste in some ways. And I put them all in a pot and it's eight hours. And if I interrupt it at one hour, there's just, there's not much value there. It needs time to extract the tastes and also bring those tastes into each other until you end up at the end of eight hours. Like, whoa, that's amazing. So… 0:08:51.4 Travis Timmons: Right. Right. Yeah, as you're pointing to, that's kind of how the agenda evolves. So we have an aim of system visibility and arrival rate. Well, how do we put an agenda around that together? So myself, the leadership team, Kelly, we've been working back and forth quite a bit, several iterations of that. So that's part of why you need that three months. You work on it. That sounds great in your head. You put it on some PowerPoint slides and then you share it with folks and they're like, "I don't know really what you're trying to say there, Travis." So there's… 0:09:25.0 Andrew Stotz: It seems like an onion and a carrot. 0:09:27.0 Travis Timmons: Right. Right. 0:09:27.3 Andrew Stotz: But I don't get the taste of it. 0:09:29.6 Travis Timmons: Yeah, so it's just working through those iterations. So miniature, little PDSAs, if you will, of the agenda. But yeah, once we get it to a point where we feel like, okay, we know what we want to work on, then the next big thing becomes how do we get the team involved ahead of the meeting? Because if you… I found very clearly over the years, if the team's not understanding what they're going to be working on coming into the meeting, that you've lost so much opportunity to learn from the entire organization. Because that's where the real learning happens when we do these is stuff that's happening that I don't have visibility of or little workarounds or somebody has a great idea, but maybe didn't feel like it was the right place to bring it up. So just have another opportunity for people to feel very comfortable sharing what breakdowns are happening. But we have homework, right? So that's one of the other big pieces of, if we're going to work on the system, we better know what we're working on that day. And if I don't tell anybody what we're working on until the day of the meeting, we could spend two hours just defining a fishbone chart, which we can talk about later perhaps. 0:11:15.7 Travis Timmons: But the point of the homework is we spend a lot of time, hours preparing the homework booklet that we give to the team about two-and-a-half weeks before the meeting. And it informs them, here's where we're going to be diving deep. We need you to come with the ideas and questions and thoughts already in your head so that we can all just dive in aggressively. Because it's so powerful when they're just bringing the ideas, referencing their homework. You can get so much more done in five hours than if we weren't doing that. So that homework becomes critical and has to match the agenda. If it's disjointed, then you've already lost some trust with your team because they're like, "You had me do all that homework and then we just didn't talk about any of it at the offsite. Like, what are we doing here." So it all has to tie together from a system view, as Dr. Deming would want, hopefully. 0:11:43.5 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And I don't know, for the listeners and the viewers out there, you probably feel the same way I do, which is kind of like, "Oh, gosh, I should have done more preparing for that last offsite." And also feeling that excitement like, "Oh my gosh, I can unleash a lot from my leadership team, from the company employees through this pre-work and all of a sudden all the mess I have sometimes in offsites of, I don't understand what you're saying by this and what do you mean by that? It could be this." And all of that's gone. And so it makes me… I'm literally thinking about my next offsite and thinking, okay, how am I going to incorporate what you're teaching? So keep going. [laughter] 0:12:26.5 Travis Timmons: Yeah. Yeah, no, it's… And I've learned from some of the best over the years, so it's… I've been very fortunate to learn some of these tools. But yeah, from the homework perspective, it'll accomplish one of our other aims, which is always an aim, but more pointed in this meeting is they start to see the entire system and the complexity that's within it and just start appreciating. "All right, here's everything that has to happen." And, man, we're doing a lot of things really well. And they understand at a deeper level, every piece on our team is critical. There's no silos, no one piece of the equation is more important than the other. If any piece of the equation doesn't happen well, then we're not successful. So that's what with the homework, it just starts making sure from a cultural standpoint and an understanding from the Deming lens, we're all on this together. We have to work on the work together. And the system visibility helps with that, with the homework. And the engagement is so high. 0:13:32.3 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, I'm sure. And that's part of what makes it exciting when I was listening you talk. And I think we're going to need to do a little pre-work on the concept of fishbone, because there are some people that are listening or viewing that may have never even heard of fishbone and fishbone analysis and all that. So maybe as we move into this next part, make sure that you do that pre-work so that we all can figure out exactly what it means, fishbone. And I think you may even have some diagram of that you can share. 0:14:03.4 Travis Timmons: Yeah, I could pull up. If you'd like, I could pull one up to share here. So did that come through for you there? 0:14:12.9 Andrew Stotz: We see it now. 0:14:14.8 Travis Timmons: So this will be… This is part of the homework booklet that we created. So we filled in what we call the main bones. And this is just the patient journey from first contact with Fitness Matters all the way through to a successful discharge. So we have the main bones, I'll call it. If you envision this being, there'd be a fish head at the far right, and then the tail would be at the left. But we just want people to start working on, okay, how does somebody first hear about us at initial contact? Well, they'll write in underneath initial contact, could be website, Google search, could be physician referral, could be my neighbor. So we start penciling in what's all of the ways people first come in contact with Fitness Matters? So we have an understanding of what that looks like. And is it a good first impression? Do we knock that out of the park? And then it just goes through all the major… We look at it as five major bones from first contact to discharge. Second is that initial contact with us to them, scheduling the evaluation. So how many times have they had to call us and leave a voicemail, or can they schedule online, or can they stop in the clinic and schedule, or how did the script come to us, do we capture their insurance data correctly? It just goes how quickly a lot of researching… 0:15:37.0 Andrew Stotz: So many ways to drop the ball? 0:15:39.6 Travis Timmons: Yeah, a lot of research to show if you don't schedule that patient within the first 48 hours of initial contact, the likelihood of them scheduling just plummets. 0:15:49.3 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. 0:15:50.0 Travis Timmons: So a lot of things we have to consider in technology and systems, process, tracking. We have a whole system of how we track how many times we've reached out. We have templates created on how we text message versus voicemail, because some people don't listen to voicemails anymore. Anyway, I could spend an hour just on this fishbone. And then it goes to evaluation day. So when they show up in the clinic, do we have their benefits ready to explain to them? Is the therapist ready for them? Have they looked at their medical history? Do they understand how much they're going to pay? How do they pay? Is it easy to pay? And then the next bone is the plan of care. So all the visits they do, how good are we at scheduling them? How good is the therapist at predicting how many visits they'll need? Is it clear? Do they understand what they owe every visit? So there's not a great experience and then they get this big surprise bill at the end and just ruins everything, right? So we work very hard to be transparent. And then a successful discharge into home exercise and our wellness services. 0:16:52.5 Travis Timmons: So that's what we want everybody to spend some time on with homework. And then at the offsite, this isn't easy to make a patient happy and have a successful outcome. And I think a lot of times in organizations, people don't fully appreciate or see the entire system and understand why this part up here. So if we don't fill out their insurance demographic correctly at the front desk and we rush them back to the evaluation because the therapist is in a hurry, well, now all of those claims aren't going to get paid. 0:17:27.9 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. 0:17:29.1 Travis Timmons: And now we've had a bad outcome for the company. So anyway, that's the fishbone chart. It really helps you diagram at a big level. And then you can dive deep on each one of these bones and turn each of the bone into its own miniature fish, we'll call it, and really dive deeper and deeper, which we'll be doing at our offsite. 0:17:46.8 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And for the listener out there, think of your own business, what's the chronology of from first contact to delivering this successful experience? Delivering that experience that you're trying to deliver in your business or your school, wherever you are. And this breaks it down into kind of the stages or the phases of that on kind of a chronological order. And that helps you to visualize. And that's part of what you've talked about is the idea of trying to, one of the big goals is visualizing. So that's a great visual of it. Maybe, I think you can probably stop sharing that now. And then also that's, I believe, activity, what I would call activity part one is working on that. Maybe talk a little bit about the mechanics of, now that we understand the fishbone and all of that, what are you asking them to do and then how are they using that? 0:18:51.2 Travis Timmons: Yeah, so the first breakout, we're going to have six tables where they'll use their homework to start filling that in. It's conversation, it's collaboration. It's like, "Oh, this person over here had that on their homework. I didn't even think about that." So that's the goal is that 10,000-foot view, here's the entire system. 0:19:09.6 Andrew Stotz: And are they doing that on a wall together or something like that? Or how is it happening? 0:19:13.4 Travis Timmons: Yeah, we're going to have big newsprint, so it'll be up and big newsprint so everybody can see what's going on. And at the end of the day, we have a very large fish that we're going to have posted and we're going to fill it in with the final product, if you will. That's the entire fishbone. So that's the aim of the first one, is the big picture. Some collaboration, some understanding of the entire system of Fitness Matters and what the complexity looks like. It also allows, one of the things we try to do with this offsite and really in culture in general, Dr. Deming talks about is driving out fear. So newer team members, especially when they start seeing, hey, let's just start talking about stuff, they really start to have a deeper understanding of our culture. And yeah, we do want to talk about stuff. We do want to talk about ways to improve. And then a follow on to that, we're going to do another breakout later in the day. And by table, each table is going to be assigned one of the main bones we just reviewed there. 0:20:20.4 Andrew Stotz: Right. 0:20:21.2 Travis Timmons: And they're going to turn that into a fish itself and do a really deep dive. And what are all the pieces and parts of initial contact? What are all the pieces and parts of eval? So on and so forth. And the aim of that piece is then with that deeper dive into the complexity, the aim is to come away with probably three PDSAs of where do we need to improve our system? Based on that work, we'll have three, maybe four really clear ideas on, okay, we're seeing this as a sticking point. The team's talked a lot about it. How do we improve that? So that's where the PDSAs come from. [overlapping conversation] 0:20:58.5 Andrew Stotz: So how do you end up figuring out? I mean, everybody's going to talk about, "We need to fix this area, we need to fix this area," or something like that. How do you then… Is it a collaboration, a discussion, is it a voting to say these are the three PDSAs we're going to work on? 0:21:16.7 Travis Timmons: Yeah, so we want it to be collaborative. There's little… Everybody will have little sticker dots. And on one of the breaks, once all these fish charts are filled out, we're going to ask team members to go around and put a sticker by the one that they think would be the highest and best use of our time and resources. So that's kind of an internal, quick, on-the-fly voting just to see where the team's heads at. And they can also have an understanding of how this is hard to… It's hard to choose. We can't work on 20 things. So where do you guys think we need to put the effort? And then at the end of the day, at the very end of the day, I have to decide based on all the feedback from the team and what our resources and capabilities are, then we have to pick three or four. But it's super powerful to have the team involved in that. 0:22:08.4 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, and one of the things about that type of voting is that sometimes people are voting on things that they think they understand what they're voting on and then you find out, actually, maybe not. So one of the fun ones to do in that case is say, okay, if you have one of your ideas up there that wasn't voted for, it could be, and you think it should be, it could be, maybe they didn't understand how you described it or how it's up there. And anybody that wants to make a pitch for that, go ahead. 0:22:37.0 Travis Timmons: Right. I like that. 0:22:37.4 Andrew Stotz: And you'll get a couple zealots saying, "I really think that this one should be up there in a higher priority." And then after that and say, "Okay, anybody want to move one of their dots?" And then that's a fun way. 0:22:52.5 Travis Timmons: I might steal that one. I like that. 0:22:55.6 Andrew Stotz: That's a fun way to say, there's always a second chance, but you got to make your pitch and it's got to convince people to move their dots. So, yep. 0:23:03.4 Travis Timmons: Yeah. I like that. Yeah, so that's how we work on the PDSAs. And it just really at the end of our meeting, I feel like the work we will have done with the homework and the how the agenda is laid out, because we spend a lot of time on the agenda and making some… So we have a timetable on each part of the agenda because my experience has been if you don't plan then things are going to go sideways. Like if you don't have a time commitment to it. And it also gives you a hard break on like, "Okay, guys, there's a couple other things we have to tackle today. This is extremely helpful, but we got to move on to the next thing." But at the end of the meeting, I have the agenda structured in a way that I feel like, I hope I'm not wrong, we'll find out next Friday. I feel like we'll have enough data, enough of the voting, enough of the conversation where I'll be able to report back to the team on like, "Hey this kind of aligns with where I think we need to put our energy and resources. Here's the top three PDSAs we're going to do." And if there was something that had a ton of votes, but we're not going to do that. I also want to be able to share with them why. "Hey, I understand that's big, but we don't have the money to do that one this year," or something like that. Because you don't want to do all this work and then just pick totally something different. And then because then you've lost total trust in your team and that's not good. 0:24:35.6 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And also, one of the things that I learned after working at investment banks over the years and teaching ethics in finance is that there's firewalls between different parts of an investment bank because they don't want the employees communicating because they're kind of doing conflicting businesses. And so a person working in one area, as I was working in research, is different from a person that's working in investment banking. I may be doing research on a company and saying, "This company is a sell." And that that guy may be doing investment banking and say, "I'm going to help this company raise capital." And we have different objectives. And and they're both legitimate activities that are happening. And we're serving different clients. I'm serving the fund manager who's considering investing. And that person's serving in the investment banking, the CEO of the company and the ownerships and the shareholders of the company. We're serving different clients, but the important thing is that we're not really supposed to know, and we generally didn't, throughout my career, know what the other was doing. But as you go up to the next level of management, they are on both sides of that wall. 0:25:49.0 Andrew Stotz: They must be able to understand what's happening on both sides for various reasons, but most importantly, they have to make decisions about the overall organization based upon a level of knowledge that maybe the people at the lower parts of the organization may be extremely excited and confident and happy about what they're doing, but they can't necessarily connect all those dots. So that's the reason why I would explain in your case that you may have to override something and say, "Look, I've listened, but I do think this is a higher priority because what you guys aren't seeing is how this connects to the implementation of the software." 0:26:25.8 Travis Timmons: Right. 0:26:26.1 Andrew Stotz: "And you're not seeing it because you haven't been doing all of this stuff that I've been doing. And so I'm going to override that one and raise that one. But the other two, let's do those," type of thing. 0:26:36.2 Travis Timmons: Yeah. And that's kind of from a… Totally agree. And that's from a Deming, make the system visible. You also have to explain from a transparency standpoint, in my opinion, anyway, if you're going to go through all this work to your point, everybody doesn't fully understand what our budget is to spend on software next year, for example, and don't expect them to, but I need to know that. So just explaining to them why we're choosing the ones we're choosing, explaining that we can't boil the ocean, and then create the PDSA and we'll give them a promise that we'll report back within… Usually, I report back within a month at the end of the meeting, of the PDSAs build out, you know, what's the aim? [overlapping conversation] 0:27:22.5 Andrew Stotz: That was my next question. How do you make sure that those PDSAs get done? Because I've left a lot of offsites. I've left them and thought, "Yep, that was interesting. Nothing's going to happen." 0:27:35.8 Travis Timmons: Yeah, no, that's where you start to lose trust from your team as well. It's like if, you know… So we revisit our meetings from last year. Like that'll be part of our recap. Okay, here's what we set out to do last year. So the beginning of the meeting is like, here's the things we talked about we wanted to do and here's what we did. Here's what we still have left to do. But yeah, with a deliverable like this, man, it would be a huge miss on my part if we didn't follow through with PDSAs. 0:28:05.5 Andrew Stotz: And are you managing those or you have one person in-charge of each one of those and then you work with them or what are the mechanics of that? 0:28:15.4 Travis Timmons: Yeah, I think the two larger ones, one of ours is going to include a software change. So that one will be in my wheelhouse for sure. 0:28:22.9 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. 0:28:24.0 Travis Timmons: But yeah, I could envision assigning a champion for two or three of the smaller ones and they won't really be small, they'll be company-wide. The software is a pretty heavy lift. 0:28:36.8 Andrew Stotz: It's interesting because now I can see you've talked about this driving out fear and sharing all information and all of that. And I think that now that I understand your process, I can see that when you get into the hard work of the PDSA, that's going to challenge assumptions, it's going to push the limits, it's going to be testing things that when you get there, everybody knows exactly why that's happening and where that came from. Maybe you can talk a little bit about this concept of one of your goals being driving out fear and using this event as one of the ways to do that. 0:29:17.0 Travis Timmons: Yeah, no, yeah, that's a big piece that I learned from Deming years ago is, people have a lot of fear. What's going on? We don't know. The transparency of this event in and of itself, my experience has been, like, "Oh, I guess we're just talking about everything here, huh?" Putting it out there just makes people comfortable knowing what's going on, what we're working on, what we're not doing as well as we could be and we're aware of it and where it's at in the priority stack. And then also, for five hours they're going to be seeing people speak up. And we call it, "Celebrate the Breakdowns." So from a Dr. Deming perspective, 96, some percent of issues within an organization are due to system issues, not people issues. So they'll start to see, like, hey, when you talk about systems and processes, you can really talk pretty intensely. Very hard to do if you're complaining about how people do things. Right? Because you're… So that system breakdown, we call it Celebrate the Breakdowns, just allows people to be more free and also understand, hey, everybody does show up wanting to do a good job. 0:30:30.7 Travis Timmons: And Travis probably assumes I show up wanting to do a good job. Let's talk about how to make this place better. So that drives out the fear just by making the system visible. And then with the PDSAs, I think it drives out fear from a standpoint of they know when we're going to make a change. This isn't just us shooting from the hip. It's a very organized, methodical, visible way that we know we need to change something. Here's how we're going to do it, and if we're wrong, we'll change it. So that's another way that the PDSA process, my experience has been it also drives out fears because they have a deep understanding of just seeing this entire process. They have confidence, like, "Okay, this isn't just flavor of the month. I'm just going to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. This is a big deal. We're going to work on it together. We're going to try it and if it's not going well, we'll try something different collaboratively." 0:31:29.5 Andrew Stotz: I want to wrap it up there and I think… Do you have anything final that you want to add to the process that we've talked about? Is there anything else that people need to know about as they're planning their offsite? 0:31:40.5 Travis Timmons: No, I think we covered quite a bit. I think the big takeaway is it's more work than I think I realized until I had exposure to Deming and some mentors in my life. And it's been a game changer on how much we can accomplish. So the time investment is worth it. 0:31:57.2 Andrew Stotz: And I think we're going to meet again later and talk, and I think we can get an update from you what went well, what do you need to improve, and guide us also as we think about our next offsite, which is pretty exciting. 0:32:11.5 Travis Timmons: Yeah, I look forward to sharing how it went. My hope is I'll report back on at least three PDSAs that we have ready to engage for 2026. 0:32:21.2 Andrew Stotz: I can't wait. Well, Travis, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for this discussion. And for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work."

I’ve written recently about driving fear out of the organization. Without a doubt I think this is the number one task for us. True North for the quality profession.

The source of innovation is freedom. All we have—new knowledge, invention—comes from freedom. Somebody responsible only to himself has the heaviest responsibility. “You cannot plan to make a discovery,” Irving Langmuir said. Discoveries and new knowledge come from freedom. When somebody is responsible only to himself, [has] only himself to satisfy, then you’ll have invention, new thought, now product, new design, new ideas.
Dr. W. Edwards Deming

Drive Out Fear on International Workers Day

Happy International Workers Day. Let’s celebrate by Driving Out Fear!

Thirty-five years ago Deming wrote that “no one can put in his best performance unless he feels secure.” Unfortunately, today we still live in a corporate world where fear and management by fear is ubiquitous. That fear is growing after more than a year of a global pandemic. As quality professionals we must deal with it at every opportunity.

Fear undermines quality, productivity, and innovation. The existence of fear leads to a vicious downward spiral.

Some sources of fear include:

Competition: Many managers use competition to instill fear. Competition is about winners and losers. Success cannot exist without failure. Managers deem the anxiety generated by competition between co-workers a good thing as they compete for scarce resources, power and status. Therefore, management encourage competition between individuals, between groups and departments and between business units.
“Us and Them” Culture: The “us and them” culture that predominates in so many organizations proliferated by silos. Includes barriers between staff and supervisors.
Blame Culture: Fear predominates in a blame culture. Blame culture can often center around enshrining the idea of human error.

We drive out fear by building a culture centered on employee well-being. This is based on seven factors.

Factor	Means	Obtained by
Responsibility	Well defined responsibilities and ownership	The opportunity an employee has to provide input into decision making in his department An individual employees’ own readiness to set high personal standards An individual employee’s interest in challenging work assignments The opportunity an employee has to improve skills and capabilities Excellent career advancement opportunities The organization’s encouragement of problem-solving and innovative thinking
Management Competence	Managers trained with skills that lend themselves to contributing to the work of their team ensures that they will be looked to for help. Managers need to be able to guide.	Direct Supervisor/Manager Leadership Abilities Management is engaged and leads by example (Gemba walks) Management by Facts
Consideration	When managers act as if employees have no feelings and just expect them to do their work as if they are robots, it can make employees uneasy. Such behavior makes them feel detached and merely a tool to carry out an end. In such environments, many times the only times employees hear from the manager is when something goes well or really bad. In either case, the perception could be that the manager has mood swings and that also adds to the employee’s insecurity. They may feel reluctant to talk to their manager for fear he is in one of his bad moods.	Senior Management’s sincere interest in employee well-being An individual employee’s relationship with their supervisor Open and effective communication Trust in management and co-workers
Cooperation	The feeling that every person is on their own to look out for their interest is a sad state to be in. Yet when everyone has a fear that the other workers will take advantage of them or make them look bad at the first opportunity, a selfish and insecure environment will result. Employees should be able to work together for the benefit of the company. They should focus on group goals in addition to their personal goals, recognizing that individually there will be failures, but that the whole is more important than the individual parts.	Trust Well trained employees Collaboration as a process Organizational culture (psychological safety) Hire and promote the right behaviors & traits to match the culture
Feedback	Information that is given back to the employee regarding their performance on the job.	Know what is expected of them (clear job descriptions) Effective processes for timely feedback Recognition Know their opinion matters
Information	Transparency is critical. When employees know nothing about how a company is doing in terms of where they should be, it is a source of uneasiness. Without that knowledge, for all they know the company could be doing very poorly and that could be a bad thing for everyone. When they have a better sense of where the company is in the scheme of their objectives set by management, it helps them feel more secure. That is not to say it is the news being good or bad that affects their security, but rather the fact that they actually have the news.	Strategy and Mission — especially the freedom and autonomy to succeed and contribute to an organization’s success Organizational Culture and Core/Shared Values Feel that their job is important
Stability	Employees feel more secure when their role does not change frequently and they understand what tomorrow will mean.	Job Content — the ability to do what I do best Availability of Resources to Perform the Job Effectively Career development – opportunities to learn and grow

Driving out Fear

Norm Howe, a colleague in the ASQ and a great guy, wrote on his company’s blog “It Doesn’t Make Any Difference How Nice the Boss Is” and I want to strongly recommend that people read it.

Norm tells an engaging story where he shares a formative experience on the value of driving out fear. He then explains that we as managers grew up in these cultures and it requires work to build a new culture.

He hits on a great note, managers are part of the cultures they grew up in. We are like trees with many rings, and it can be very difficult just to change that.

I love story-sharing like this.