Principle 14: Commit to Transformation
Common management myths (see here and here) must be replaced by sound guiding principles. In this post, I’ll describe the fourteenth such principle, Commit to Transformation.
It is worth noting that the 14 Principles for Educational Systems Transformation are mutually supporting, so it is important to understand all of them rather than studying them in isolation. An in-depth discussion of the full set of Principles for Transformation can be found in Chapter 3 of my recently released book Win-Win: W. Edwards Deming, the System of Profound Knowledge, and the Science of Improving Schools.
Principle 14: Clearly define top management's commitment to continual improvement of quality and its obligation to implement the 14 Principles. Plan and take action to put everyone in the organization to work to accomplish the transformation; the transformation is everyone's job. Start with education for all in positions of leadership.
Management in authority will struggle over every one of the 14 Principles as well as the management myths discussed in Win-Win. To effectively address the obligations inherent in Principle 14, school systems should start by providing education for all in positions of leadership. The initial education should include an introduction to the System of Profound Knowledge with emphasis placed on helping leaders to understand the systems view of organizations as well as the Theory of Variation. In Out of the Crisis, Dr. Deming offered several steps in order to get started on the transformation. Organizational context will play a critical role in your own process, but I’ve paraphrased and translated the steps for an education sector audience that can serve as a starting point.
The school board and superintendent must study the 14 Principles, understand their implications, agree on a strategic direction, and make a deliberate decision to adopt and implement the new philosophy.
Transformation implies a change of state. The school board and superintendent must feel a burning dissatisfaction with past procedures and a strong desire to transform their management approach. They must have the courage to break with tradition, even to the point of exile among peers.
The school board and superintendent must explain by seminars, community meetings, and other means to a critical mass of school system staff, students, and parents why change is necessary and that the change will involve everybody. People across the organization must understand the System of Profound Knowledge, the 14 Principles, and the management myths to ensure that enough people know the what and the how of transformation.
Every job and every activity within the school system is a part of a process that can be improved. A flow diagram for an activity such as teaching and learning processes will divide the work into stages, which as a whole form a process. The goal is to optimize the process as a whole, not to optimize individual stages.
Figure 1. A Flow Diagram of Teaching & Learning Processes
Students and teachers work together at each stage to produce high-quality learning. As students move from early elementary to late elementary to middle school and beyond, each stage is also working with the preceding stage toward optimization. Ultimately, all stages are working together toward quality about which the ultimate customer will boast!
Utilize the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle as a procedure to learn how to improve the organization’s processes.
Everyone in the school system can take part in a team, the aim of which is to improve the input and output of any stage of the process. A team may very well be composed of people from different functional areas and can also include student participants. Transformation is everyone’s job, which means everyone has a part in dealing with one or more of the issues facing the school system (e.g., drive out fear, working to improve a specific process).
Deliberately construct the school system for quality with certain percentages of staff understanding continual improvement and statistical methods at a basic, intermediate, and advanced level.
The 14 Principles for Educational Systems Transformation serve as a logical extension of the System of Profound Knowledge applied to schools. They prescribe the management dos and don’ts for a healthy environment for work and learning during the process of transformation. They are not a checklist to be completed in sequence, but rather an interdependent and mutually supporting set of guiding principles for systems leaders working to transition to the Deming philosophy.
Blog Series: 14 Principles for Educational Systems Transformation
The four components of the System of Profound Knowledge work in concert to provide us with profound insights about how our organizations operate so that leaders can in turn work to optimize the whole of our systems. However, there is a step beyond simply avoiding the management myths. The next step is to be able to think and make decisions using the lens provided by the System of Profound Knowledge. This is where the core set of 14 Principles come into play. In this series, I’m describing the principles that will enable you to move from theory to practice with the Deming philosophy.
***
John A. Dues is the Chief Learning Officer for United Schools Network, a nonprofit charter management organization that supports four public charter schools in Columbus, Ohio. He is also the author of the newly released book Win-Win: W. Edwards Deming, the System of Profound Knowledge, and the Science of Improving Schools. Send feedback to jdues@unitedschoolsnetwork.org.