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‘”

When is Change an Improvement? – In Their Own Words

How do we really know when improvement has happened inside a school or organization? In this episode, John Dues and Andrew Stotz unpack a clear, three-part definition of improvement and show why evidence, method, and sustained results matter far more than year-to-year comparisons. Their discussion offers a practical lens for leaders who want to distinguish true progress from noise and build changes that last. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. The topic for today is, How To Define Improvement. John, take it away. 0:00:23.3 John Dues: Hey, Andrew. It's good to be back. Yeah, I think this is really interesting. Apologies on the front end. I'm a little bit under the weather, so I may sound a little raspy today. But you know, one of the things that's really interesting is there's lots of claims of improvement. In my world, there's lots of claims of school im- improvement. I would even go as far as to say that those claims are like a dime a dozen, something like that. And the reason I say that is not to be mean or anything, but you know, I think that a lot of these claims, they're not grounded any kind of reasonable evidence. And I think sort of even beyond that, that claims are often made without a logical definition of improvement. So I thought in this episode we could talk about a three-part definition that makes it really easy to tell when improvement has occurred and just as importantly, when it hasn't. 0:01:21.9 Andrew Stotz: Exciting. 0:01:23.2 John Dues: Yeah. When I talk about this, I always like to start with a challenge. So, you know, if I'm in a workshop, I'll say, you know, get out a piece of paper and a pen so the listeners could do this as well and think about, you know, the successful improvement efforts that you've led throughout your career. So in my world, maybe it's increase in state test scores or maybe you improved student enrollment in your school. Maybe you did a better job at retaining the teachers in your school. It could be any number of things. Maybe it's decreasing student office referrals or decreasing chronic absenteeism rates in your school or your school system, which are two things on everybody's mind coming out of the pandemic especially. And I tell people, just create a list of those instances. And I give them a few minutes usually. And typically, people come up with eight, nine, 10 or so instances of improvement, whether that's teacher in their own classroom or principal in their school, or a superintendent thinking about the whole system. Then I say to them, now what I want you to do is pause and think, what does it mean to improve? 0:02:46.7 John Dues: What do you mean by that? And that really brings us to this important question. What is improvement? You know, and this was… Full disclosure, when I started thinking about this, I stumbled across the definition in a book I'll show you here in a second. But when I stumbled across this, you know, there was some conviction. And I think that probably a lot of educational leaders or just, you know, leaders in general would say, actually, I never really thought about that. I don't have an answer for this seemingly simple question. And like I said, I didn't have an answer to that question when I really thought about it, when I stumbled across the definition, probably for the majority of my career, maybe the first 20 years or so, if I'm at year 25. So, yeah, the first two decades, I would not have had a clear answer for that simple question. Now, I turn to this seminal work in the field of improvement science called The Improvement Guide. I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with this. And I'll share my screen so people can see the book and kind of share an interesting story about the book. And, you know, when you're… Can you see my screen all right now? 0:04:06.9 Andrew Stotz: Yep. 0:04:08.1 John Dues: So you can see, if you're just listening, you can see the covers of two books. So on the left, a lot of people will recognize The Improvement Guide. But there's an arrow up there. It says, second edition. And a lot of people will recognize that book. Probably less people. Maybe some people that have been doing improvement work for maybe three decades will know this other book, the first edition of The Improvement Guide. It's this purple book on the right, if you're watching. But there's this interesting anecdote that I actually think I might have heard maybe on your podcast when some of the authors were on. And almost as soon as they wrote this first edition, this purple edition, they got this note from this professor in Brazil, and it said, I know you guys are really big into improvement, and you're really big on operational definitions, but you've written this whole book on improvement, and nowhere in the book have you defined what you mean by improvement. So, you know, talk about a swing and a miss. 0:05:15.0 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And just for listeners out there, you can go to the podcast.deming.org and you can search for quality as an organizational strategy with Cliff Norman and Dave Williams. We didn't talk about The Improvement Guide specifically, but definitely it's worth listening to those two. 0:05:33.3 John Dues: Yeah, and I think… So any of us that feel bad when we come to realize, like, how obvious that question is when we've made claims of improvement and don't have a definition. So even these guys that were writing a whole guide about how to do improvement missed as well. You know, and it's pretty obvious when you think about it that The Improvement Guide, that a book like that should have a clear definition for the central concept. That's right in the title. But it should be just as obvious to leaders that they also need a definition of improvement. And that definition should really precede any improvement claims then. So I thought it'd be interesting to take a look at the definition that the authors came up with in their improved second edition. 0:06:20.9 Andrew Stotz: Improvement in their improvement. 0:06:24.4 John Dues: Improvement in their improvement guide. Right. And the definition is really easy to follow. It's got three parts, and now I've adopted it into my own improvement work. But what they've said is improvement is "a change that alters how work is done or the makeup of a tool that produces visible positive differences relative to historical norms and relevant measures and it's sustained into the future." So we can kind of break that three parts of the definition down now. So in part one of the definition, what you have to be able to do is point to a change that was made that led to better results. You know, that could be a new tool you're using, a new approach, a new framework, maybe it's a new staff role, but something has to change, a new method, something has to change in what you're doing. So that's sort of part one of the definition. Part two is performance improved after the change compared to past results. So that also should be fairly obvious. So you did something different. You noted when you started this new thing, and at some point in relative proximity to when you tried that new thing, the data improved. 0:07:54.2 John Dues: You know, it went up. If that's the direction of good or, you know, if it's like chronic absenteeism or office referrals, you want it to go down. But you see that in the data after you've made this change, that's part two. And then part three is that improvement after the change was sustained into the future. So it wasn't just a temporary thing because you were paying a lot of attention to it, but you made the change. The data improved over time after you did this new thing, and then it kept going into the future. 0:08:27.9 Andrew Stotz: Which is the hardest part, by the way. 0:08:30.1 John Dues: The hardest part, I'd say too. Assuming you could bring about improvement, then sustaining it into the future, especially as you maybe take your eye off it a little bit, and then work on something else, that's very, very difficult. 0:08:43.1 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, the initial seizure that you get into of making change can be really powerful compared to the energy, you know, devoted to sustaining it. 0:08:55.9 John Dues: Yeah. 0:08:56.3 Andrew Stotz: And you could also argue, if something's not easily sustained, was it really an improvement? 0:09:02.8 John Dues: Right. I think that's just right. And, you know, what I do in the workshop then is then after I go over the definition, I ask people, now, think back to your list of successful improvement projects. You know, and for the listeners, if you pause, then you created your own list and then you heard that definition. Then I just asked the participants, would you revise your answer after reading this definition of improvement? And ask people, okay, now how many things, how many items are on that list? And a lot of people, if they're being honest, are left with none, actually. You know, because this definition sets a really high bar. But I think it is the right bar if you're actually interested in improving outcomes in your school, in my case, or in your organization. And I think what you often run up against is, this is kind of a simplified version of most improvement claims. But in my world, you hear claims, something like, you know, our state test scores improved. Right. The translation is, this school's or this year scores are higher than last year's scores. 0:10:25.8 John Dues: But that claim falls really short of that definition. Well, okay, the scores are better than last year. Well, what did you do to make them better? Also, a single data point is probably not enough to back that claim up. Let's instead turn to an example that meets the definition, and it'll help you understand how powerful this can be in practice. So, you know, let's suppose that you've been working to increase some student outcome measure. Let's say we gather it on a monthly basis, whatever this thing is. So now I'm going to show you a visual that has some data plotted over time. And the three parts of the definition of improvement have been labeled right on that chart. And having this visual is very, very powerful. This is when this definition really clicked. So I'll go ahead and share my screen again with you. All right. Can you see that chart? 0:11:35.9 Andrew Stotz: Yep. 0:11:36.9 John Dues: Okay, great. So first off, if you're watching that, you can just see very quickly that the claim of improvement has been substantiated with evidence. So for the people that are just listening, we have some data plotted over time for the first 15 months and it's kind of traveling along around an 80% average. And then all of a sudden that data shifts up substantially to now it's humming along at about a 91, 92% average. And it's much harder to sort of internalize this without being able to see it. But I'll do my best to explain it. So the first thing was, part one. There's a clear point in time where a change was introduced. So that's labeled as part one. Right in between month 15 and 16, there's an arrow there on the chart where some change was made. If this is a teacher's data, maybe they made some type of change to how they were instructing the class. 0:12:55.3 Andrew Stotz: In research, sometimes we'll call that time zero. 0:13:00.6 John Dues: Time zero, absolutely. And then second again, there's this clear difference in results after the change was introduced as compared to historical results. So that's part two. So there's this positive, visible difference relative to historical norms. Now, you know, this is an example for illustration purposes and I wanted to make it very clear, like this delineation, this definition. But in reality, you know, if you're a teacher trying this new method, for example, it might be that even if the method is successful, you're not maybe going to see the results immediately. Right. But this illustrates, what you're hoping to see. And it makes it very clear. And then part three on here, that improvement was sustained in the future. So you see the bump in scores in this, whatever this outcome is in this hypothetical in month 16. But it wasn't just months 16 and 17, it carried forth for another 15 months at this much higher level. So you can very quickly start to see there's this profound difference between most improvement claims and one supported by this three part definition. It makes it very simple. When do we introduce something new? And then what does the data look like over time after an initial baseline period? 0:14:36.9 Andrew Stotz: It reminds me of something I often say to people, which is, do you ever make the same mistake twice in your business? And of course, everybody says yes. And I ask them, imagine if you never made the same mistake twice, how would that change the outcome of your business? And then we have a discussion about that. But the point is that most people just live in a world where they never are able to really sustain improved performance. They just fall back to the same things. And this chart is a good way of understanding, have we truly sustained improved performance? 0:15:24.4 John Dues: Yeah, yeah. And you have to have a method. You know, that's why Deming would frequently say, you can't just have a goal. You have to be able to answer the question by what method? So that's why part one of this definition was calling out whatever change was introduced. Because in this system, in that baseline period from month one through 15, while there are some ups and downs in that data, it's really just bouncing around that 80% average. And if you don't change something in that system, then you're very likely just to keep getting those same results over time. Some fundamental change has to be introduced so you have a stable system, but it's not satisfactory. So you got to change something. And then you're going to keep gathering the data to see if that change had an impact. So again, it's not rocket science. And it was pretty intuitive to see that definition in that improvement guide. And then actually this sort of chart I'm showing you with a three part definition combined with a control chart or a process behavior chart, I saw this in their latest book called Quality as an Organizational Strategy. 0:16:42.0 John Dues: And when I saw the visualization of the improvement definition, which was only in like text form in The Improvement Guide, then it all just clicked. Oh, this is so obvious what this definition actually means and how you could tell if something has improved or not. So I think anybody that's doing improvement work, you know, whether you're in schools or some other type of organization, and whether you're the superintendent of the entire system, the principal of the building or the teacher in a classroom, all of you can use this. A student could use this, an athlete could use this. This definition, it doesn't really matter. It's sector agnostic and can be applied, you know, pretty widely against different contexts. But it makes it very clear how to tell when things are getting better, how to tell if, you know, maybe things are going the other direction or if they're just staying the same. Makes it very, very clear. 0:17:36.8 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, I mean, it's a great thought exercise that you started with that, you know, got me thinking and I'm sure for the listeners and the viewers got them thinking, like, what changed? Where have we really improved? And one of the hard things in business, and I'm sure it's the same in teaching, is that ultimately personalities and ultimately it's about the people, whether that's business or teaching. And one of the things that you can say about people that's commonly said, whether it's true or not, I'll leave you to think about that. And that is people don't change. 0:18:19.8 John Dues: People don't like to change. 0:18:21.1 Andrew Stotz: They don't like to change. And I would argue that they rarely change. 0:18:25.9 John Dues: Yeah, yeah, no, I would agree with that. 0:18:28.5 Andrew Stotz: I mean, the whole mission of life is to get to a point where you don't have to change. That is the human body, the human mind is just like trying to get to that point. 0:18:42.6 John Dues: Yeah. Unfortunately, it doesn't work. 0:18:45.6 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And then you die. 0:18:50.1 John Dues: Yeah. 0:18:51.3 Andrew Stotz: But it just gets me thinking too, about… And for everybody, here we are at the… We're discussing this on the 9th of December. So we're getting near the end of the year, thinking about what we're trying to do next year and all that. And in my coffee business, as an example, we've had our shares of ups and downs, but we've tried to right the ship as far as making sure that we've got the right balance of profitability, the right number of staff, cash flow and a buildup of cash so that we have the resources to go after markets. And the question is, that I always have in my mind is, how do we prevent ourselves from slipping back into some old habits of maybe spending on marketing and sales and then not getting the delivery of that, and therefore the costs go up, but the revenues don't follow? How do we ensure that the improvements that we're making right now aren't just lost six months from now? And this starts to give me some ideas that I'm thinking about. 0:20:00.5 John Dues: Yeah. I mean, and once you get that improvement, like, how do you sustain it? How do you have the discipline to do that? 0:20:09.1 Andrew Stotz: Well, I think the first thing that this raises is, are we clearly measuring, first, whether the improvement happened? 0:20:19.3 John Dues: Yeah. 0:20:19.7 Andrew Stotz: And second, whether it was sustained? 0:20:22.8 John Dues: Yeah. And even before that, you know, just having a baseline. Most people have the data somewhere, but they haven't plotted it like this so it's clear what the typical performance is currently, a lot of people don't even take that step. You know, it's just last year, this year. Last month. This month. 0:20:39.8 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, that's good point. That's a good point. That's something you pointed out to me a long time ago about looking at, you know, my enrollments in Valuation Masterclass Boot Camp and saying, well, you need to understand, you know, what's the system you're operating in, and therefore, you've got to understand what that system can produce before you start thinking about, you know, what's your next steps. 0:21:01.6 John Dues: Yeah, yeah. And like I said in the middle of this episode, you know, this is a very high bar. This is not easy to accomplish. It takes discipline. It takes continual improvement. Dr. Deming talked about he liked using continual versus continuous because a lot of this would be discontinuous. You know, you have a focus, you may be improving an area, then you have to change your focus. But you can't keep your eye totally off this other thing. Like you were just saying, you have to kind of keep your eye on multiple things to keep an organization going. And that's part of the challenge of running an organization for sure. Be it a coffee business or a school. 0:21:39.9 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. It's interesting that we're talking about the definition of improvement long after we talked about the method of improvement, like PDSA. 0:21:50.5 John Dues: Yeah, yeah. And that's probably the best method I've come across. So, you know, in this visual that we're looking at, for people that can see it, you know, part one, a change was introduced. The most powerful tool that I found thus far is the PDSA cycle. That's where you would document the change. And again, this is for illustrative purposes, but in reality you probably have to run multiple cycles and kind of learn your way to a better system rather than you're probably not going to see this. Now, there are some things where you may see this start improvement between month 15 and month 16, but the reality is, in most situations that's going to take multiple rounds of PSAs and where there's sort of a gradual improvement over time. Again, you know, there are some things where you could see an improvement like this, but most stuff, it just takes sustained effort over time and continual learning and continual improvement type stuff. 0:22:51.4 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, I mean, this really helps me, and I'm sure for the listeners and the viewers to put PDSA in a very clear spot, which is, it's the tool for sustained improvement. Because you could imagine that in this chart where we have time zero and we have the past, let's say that's our starting point. We don't have any future data, but let's imagine that according to PDSA, we decided that we would try out and test out one particular method. And we find after testing it, no improvement, no change. Okay, that wasn't what we expected. Now we got to go back and adjust and then run the PDSA again. And then let's say we do that again and we find very little improvement. Okay, that wasn't what we expected. And our goal is to really try to get to a higher level of improvement. And let's say the third round, we get to a point where we get, oh, now this has sustained, you know this has produced improvement way beyond the others. The question is, can it be sustained? And that also has to do with the constraints of the system. 0:24:01.0 Andrew Stotz: Because if you don't have the proper, let's say, electricity, steady electricity supply, or you have problems with employees coming and going, bad training or whatever, you may find that you did make an initial improvement, but you weren't able to sustain it, so you couldn't really call it an improvement, it was more like a test. 0:24:24.0 John Dues: Yeah, yeah. These are all things that make improvement work so challenging, especially in a complex organization. Very, very challenging. No doubt. But I think this is probably a good place to wrap up and summarize. But I think just having this clear definition for the concept of improvement, I think there's sort of these three big ideas that I think from this episode that can put you on the right track. I think one is just recognizing now kind of being listening for this in your organization that most improvement claims lack evidence. So when you hear somebody in your organization make a claim, this went up, or this got better, or that got better, you know, ask for some evidence. How do you know? Let me see. Show me what you're seeing. How do you know this is improvement? So I'd call that sort of big idea one is, this idea that you need evidence. 0:25:27.7 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. The other thing I would take away from it, too, is actually in the process, you end up narrowing in on one thing. That chart is about one specific outcome. 0:25:42.6 John Dues: Yeah. 0:25:43.6 Andrew Stotz: And once you get so narrow to one specific outcome and you're tracking it and following it, it gets you more focused. And I think that to really get sustained improvement, you have to focus. And it's so easy to be distracted by the 15 things that need to be improved that you see as you walk down the hall in a school every day or as you… But in the end, true improvement is really hard. You can't improve 15 things. You can probably only improve one right now. 0:26:13.2 John Dues: Yeah, you gotta have a focus area for sure. What's the most important thing or the most important few things? Yeah. So the big idea one is, you know, from what I've seen, most of these improvement claims lack evidence. You need evidence. The second big idea is very simple. You know, you have to have this definition, and it's got to precede any improvement claims. Whatever your definition is, that this is the one I would use, this is the one I do use. But you know, before you can make a claim, you have to have a definition that clearly outlines when the thing has happened and when it hasn't. And in my mind, big idea three, is use this three part definition because it makes it so easy to tell when things have improved again and when things haven't. Yeah, after you apply these three big ideas, you know, I think you'll be able to answer the question, have we improved with conviction. You know, it makes it very, very straightforward. I like very straightforward things. And this is very straightforward. 0:27:14.8 Andrew Stotz: Yep. Most improvement claims lack evidence. John, 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. You can find John's book, Win-Win W. Edwards Deming; the System of Profound Knowledge and the Science of Improving Schools on Amazon.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with my favorite quote from Dr. Deming, and that is that 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.