New Book Review: Win-Win
Leading Schools with a Deming View
Education, industry, and government should interact as a system, with cooperation—win, win.
Deming, Dr. W.E., The New Economics, 3rd. ed. (p. 22)
Our schools must preserve and nurture the yearning for learning that everyone is born with.
Joy in learning comes not so much from what is learned, but from learning.
Joy on the job comes not so much from the result, the product, but from contribution to the optimization of the system in which everybody wins.
Ibid. (p. 100)
The old adage, “If the student hasn’t learned, the teacher hasn’t taught” is not true or useful. Instead a much more useful characterization is, “If the learner hasn’t learned, the system is not yet adequate.”
Scholtes, Peter. The Leader’s Handbook. (p. 36)
If we wish to make breakthrough improvements in our schools and school systems (similar to the transformation in Japan after World War II that Deming supported), we must make time to work on the system of learning and to continually improve it with the help of our students. The System of Profound Knowledge provides the theoretical foundation for the transformation of conventional classrooms to those guided by quality learning principles.
Langford, David, as quoted by John Dues, October 26, 2020.
THE AIM for today’s entry is to provide a brief review of John Dues’ new book, Win-Win, on his view of how to apply Dr. W.E. Deming’s theory of management toward the transformation of our prevailing style of elementary and middle school administration. It is, to the best of my knowledge, the first new book of its genre about Deming’s teachings to be published in many years and has arrived at just the right time before the end of school year here in North America, providing perfect summer reading material for parents, teachers, principals, administrators, and anyone who wants to learn how to improve our systems of education.
FULL DISCLOSURE: John was kind enough to provide me a review copy of the book in early May at his expense (he even refused to accept remuneration for postage!), and I have known him “virtually” for a few years. I’ve repaid this debt by highlighting the hell out of nearly every page, along with furious scribbles of “NB!” and “YES!” and other erudite thoughts in the margins which this review will draw upon. Subsequently, I also bought my own copy on Kindle to make it easier to search while writing this review.
TL;DR
For the impatient, I won’t bury the lede: Dues does a very good job in Win-Win explaining how schools and systems of education can be improved through learning and applying Dr. Deming’s industry-agnostic theory for transformation of management. Readers will be quickly immersed into the System of Profound Knowledge and its attendant domains, then into deep-dives on each with practical examples drawn from Dues’ own experiences applying the theory as the Chief Learning Officer at United Schools Network.
Dues’ writing style is clear and relaxed, making the material accessible to a broad audience regardless of prior exposure or experience with Deming. Accordingly, it is not necessary to have read The New Economics or Out of the Crisis or have any particular expertise to benefit from the book, but doing so afterward will undoubtedly be easier and yield new perspectives. This said, some new learners may want to explore reading Win-Win as part of a study group to aid their understanding as it can challenge many preconceived ideas that will need discussion to overcome.
Overall, while this is a book written with educators and education administrators in mind, I think it broadly applicable as a guide to learning how to lead with a Deming view in a domain outside of manufacturing. It should be on the shelf of any serious Deming enthusiast, practitioner, or thinker.
It All Began in 1986…
Win-Win is, to my knowledge, the first new book on the Deming management method in many years (let alone one on how to improve education), with a pedigree dating back to 1986 when a young teacher by the name of David Langford, attended his first Deming Four Day Seminar, after reaching out to him for guidance on how to apply his theory in the classroom. The knowledge he gained led to a transformation of Mount Edgcumbe HS, the first public boarding school in the US, and subsequently to a long career teaching thousands of educators his approach to applying Deming’s theory toward quality in education through numerous seminars of his own, contributing to many positive, whole-system transformations.
Fast-forward to 2020 and a similar young educator from a non-profit charter school in Ohio contacts Langford to about his approach to applying Deming in schools, resulting in a long-term coaching relationship, the development of Continual Improvement Fellowships, and the beginning of a transformation not only of himself and his colleagues, but the management and administration of their schools. Win-Win is Dues’ “first step” in sharing what he has learned with the aim of helping others begin their own transformations.
Who is John Dues?
John is the Chief Learning Officer at United Schools Network, a system of four open-enrolment, public charter schools located in Columbus, OH. He is an Honours graduate of Miami (OH) University, with a Masters of Education degree from the University of Cincinnati. He previously served as a school director and dean of academics at USN, along with prior teaching roles in Atlanta, Denver, and Cleveland.
In addition to the guidance he received from David Langford, Dues’ also learned statistical theory from Dr. Donald Wheeler, an expert in the domain of quality improvement through statistical analysis, who also knew Deming personally and made significant contributions to refining cornerstone methods for data analysis such as the Process Behaviour Chart.
Who is this book for? What is the AIM?
Dues’ correctly identifies his target audience as the leadership responsible for administration and management of schools: public, private, non-profit, along with those responsible for training the next generation of leaders. His overall aim for the book (yes, he does cover what an aim statement is) is to equip the reader with the knowledge and skills to improve schools by applying Dr. Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge. In other words, it’s not just a book that diagnoses the challenges and problems in schools and how to improve them, but how to improve the reader’s thinking by learning new theory and how to apply it.
What Does Win-Win Mean?
In the title of his book Dues is making a direct reference to the aim Dr. Deming put forward for his philosophy on management: for everybody to win, over the long-term, through cooperation rather than adversarial, win/lose competition which he believed was the cause for America’s gradual decline after WWII. Deming famously articulated this with his Forces of Destruction model in The New Economics, which Dues also recapitulates in Chapter 9. The aim is to restore joy in learning.
How is it structured?
As a system in and unto itself, Win-Win is comprised of ten chapters and two appendices spanning 234 pages not including the glossary and index. Each chapter is prefaced with an introductory story or anecdote and, in an homage to Deming’s writing style, an aim statement to frame the learning to come.
Two appendices round out the book, the first providing a summation of the Improvement Process Steps Dues’ used to guide his changes at USN, which are based on Cliff Norman and Ron Moen’s The Improvement Guide; the second provides thorough instructions on how to construct both parts of a Process Behaviour Chart for the Individuals (X) and Moving Ranges (mR) using techniques developed by Dr. Don Wheeler and adapted by Mark Graban in his book Measures of Success. Only criticism here is that the screen-cap for the first Appendix is a little difficult to read owing to the shading used on the spreadsheet cells.
How to Read This Book
Within the ~234 pages of Win-Win, Dues consolidates almost everything a current or aspiring leader in education needs to know to begin learning how to improve the quality of service a school provides through study and application of Dr. Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge. Dues’ aim is to transform your thinking on improvement and how to accomplish it, and this means being an active participant in your learning. Get a highlighter, pen, and notebook ready, because every page is going to provoke a thought, reaction, or epiphany. As you progress, I also suggest leveraging a technique that Eric Budd uses with IQI Academy participants to deepen and accelerate their mastery of new concepts called “Teach to Learn” where you “teach” what you have learned after reading a chapter to a willing colleague or friend.
What Dues Will Teach You
Dues proposal is simple: The current troubles we see in education systems and schools everywhere, just as in other organizations, are directly attributable to the ways they are managed, ie. as independent parts rather than cohesive wholes with adversarial competition favoured over cooperation and teamwork. This has led to belief in a mythology of management practices for improvement that misdirect attention from where it is needed by offering apparent common-sense shortcuts. With each chapter, he methodically steps you through deconstructing your current beliefs and rebuilding them through learning Deming’s theory with practical examples.
You will learn:
How to see a school as a system of interconnected components, all serving a singular, unifying long-term aim;
How to create an aim statement to unify behind and align improvements against;
Why it’s important to understand who the “customers” of your school are - hint: It’s not the students;
What an actual improvement is, compared to what passes for one;
How managing a school as a system can not only improve how it works for everyone, but head-off creating problems where “the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing”;
Focusing on the learning over the grade;
How common myths of management like Best Practices, Performance Appraisals, Merit Pay, Rating and Ranking People, do not work as advertised in schools, let alone anywhere else;
How to quickly analyze school system data such as attendance, to differentiate common patterns of variation from special ones worth investigating;
How to regulate and test improvements using scientific thinking with Plan-Do-Study-Act loops that even students can participate in helping to develop and run in the classroom;
How schools can play an important part in reversing what Deming called the “Forces of Destruction” of the individual, ie. “win/lose” adversarial competition, in favour of “win/win” cooperation.
⚠️ Cognitive Dissonance Ahead ⚠️
There isn’t much in Win-Win that will surprise those with a good understanding of Deming’s counterintuitive views, however I expect it will be a significant challenge at times for those who come to it without prior exposure. Nowhere is this more evident than in learning Deming’s firm belief in the abolishment of grades, which is grounded in his theory on systems contributing most to an individual’s performance and the need to re-prioritize cooperation and teamwork over adversarial “win/lose” competition.
Dues presents this challenge as a variation on Deming’s famous “equation with two unknowns”, as an “impossible” equation he derived from how his state grades schools based on an aggregation of student test scores out of 120 points. Solve the following for “F” - it’s impossible, because you cannot quantify the contributions of the other systems (A through E) to the score:
Dues readily admits that while he knows why this can’t be done, and why it shouldn’t be done because it is a fool’s abstraction to try and separate an individual school’s performance from the larger system it works within, he still struggles to apply it to students. But he’s working on finding better alternatives, nonetheless.
My Favourite Chapters: On Variation
Hands-down, the chapters on Understanding Variation and Using Knowledge About Variation are my favourites. Dues clearly explains the two types of variation all systems present (common, special) and how to identify them using the data already at hand with a Process Behaviour Chart. He demonstrates how he used this knowledge to gain insight into issues with school attendance and improve how it is communicated and understood, going from a common dashboard with two data point comparisons like this:
To a Process Behaviour Chart like the one below, with data presented in context to enable fast identification of patterns of concern, ie. the dots that fall outside of the two heavy lines. This one in particular shows the effect the pandemic response had on attendance and engagement, a system-on-system impact:
One Surprising Thing I Learned…
Dues mentions in the book that USN follows every student after they graduate through high school and post-secondary, so as to understand how well they are doing in preparing them for the future — a whole system perspective of education that I’ve not seen anywhere else, and certainly not here in Canada. This ties directly back to the AIM that Dues and his colleagues have set for USN, in a very Deming-aligned way, with a view for the future:
Get the Book, Share it Widely
I could go on and on about Win-Win, and in fact that’s been a stumbling block for me to get this written in a timely fashion. There’s so much good knowledge in this book that it’s difficult to summarize and not feel like I’m leaving a lot out that I want to share! I cannot recommend this book enough to anyone with an interest in learning about how to improve an organization, especially schools and school systems. Get a copy, read it with others, share it with teachers and administrators and board trustees you may know. It may not start a revolution, but it could change just the right minds and bring a win-win view into your schools.
You can purchase Win-Win via Amazon or through the publisher, Myers Education Press.