Goal Setting is Often an Act of Desperation, Part II

January is a popular month to set new goals, so I decided to kick-off this year with a four-part series on this very topic. In Part I of the series, I proposed four conditions that organizations should understand prior to setting a goal.

Organizations should understand the capability of the system or process under study.
Organizations should understand variation within the system or process under study.
Organizations should understand if the system or process under study is stable.
Organizations should have a logical answer to the question, “By what method?”

Absent an understanding of these conditions, goals are too often “arbitrary and capricious.”

Learning to ImproveJohn DuesJanuary 26, 2022Deming, variation, school improvement, goals, charter schools, data analysis, educational accountability, school accountability, System of Profound Knowledge, statistical process control

Filtering Out the Noise

Last month, I discussed the difference between information and knowledge by analogizing the two concepts to data ponds (information) and data streams (knowledge). A key idea in the transformation of information to knowledge is adding the element of time and visualizing the data in a tool called a process behavior chart. Part of the power of the process behavior chart (PBC) is its ability to filter out the noise in our data; the idea of filtering out data “noise” is the focus of this post.

Learning to ImproveJohn DuesJuly 28, 2021Deming, understanding variation, data analysis, school improvement, statistical process control, process behavior chart, charter schools