Episode Details

Before you start solving a problem, you need to know what, precisely, you're trying to solve. In this episode, John Dues and Andrew Stotz talk about how to figure out the problem on which you will focus your team's efforts.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.2 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, Define The Problem. John, take it away.

0:00:22.9 John Dues: Hey, Andrew. It's good to be back. Yeah. So, we've been going through this improvement model just as a refresher. Two episodes ago we looked at the three phases of performance measurement, research, accountability, and improvement. That was an important frame at the start of this process. And then in the last episode we discussed how we made sure in that first step of the model, we step back and see our system, see the full system in which we work. And I showed you some improvement tools that we use to visualize the improvement team or the group's thinking for each of a set of guiding questions. So, we looked at a system flow chart and that sort of said to us, within our system, kind of saw how things flow into the system, the things that we do, and then the outputs, and the questions there were, what's the largest system to improve on and what's the aim of that system? And then we took a look at an affinity diagram, and we used that just to answer the question, what are the opportunities for improvement within the target system? And then we used this tool called an interrelationship digraph, where we prioritize basically the various opportunities for improvement. And then it's been through this model that everybody can see these four steps that we're talking...

0:01:57.7 AS: Well, for the listeners, they may not be able to see, but for the viewers, yeah.

0:02:01.7 JD: For the listeners, they can't see it. But the model that we've been talking through, for sure, we've been working through this four-step improvement model, and we've spent most of our time on step one, which is set the challenge and direction. And we'll remain here at this point in the process today as well. And then later on in the series, we'll go on to the subsequent steps. So step two, grasp the current condition. Step three, establish your next target condition. Step four, experiment to overcome obstacles. And some of the first episodes in the series, we talked through just a high level overview of each of those things. And then we've also said that we wanna do all of these steps with a team that's made up of somebody that has Profound Knowledge, some number of people that have the authority to work or change or redesign the system, and in some number of people that are working in the system.

0:02:57.3 JD: So that's just kind of a refresher for those that have been following along. And again, in step one of this model, this is where we're at right now, we ask, where do we wanna be in the long run? And so we're really thinking about a longer range goal that will differentiate us from other organizations. So in our case, schools. And it seems nearly impossible at the outset. We've said that. And we've also talked about what's the right time period for this challenge or direction to be set for, in terms of out in the horizon? Then what I said was, somewhere in the neighborhood of six months to three years, sort of anything less than six months, it's just too fast to put the team together and really dive in and do the work that you need to do. Anything beyond three years, it just seems so far that, you n