Aug 26, 2024
In this episode, John Dues and Andrew Stotz discuss the firstpart of John's path for improvement model - setting the challenge.Using an example from United Schools Network, John explains theiraspirations for cutting chronic absenteeism rates.
TRANSCRIPT
0:00:02.4 AndrewStotz: My name is Andrew Stotz. And I'll be your host as wecontinue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming.Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part ofthe new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming'sprinciples to unleash student joy in learning. And the topic fortoday is "set the challenge." John, take it away.
0:00:24.6 John Dues:It's good to be back, Andrew. Yeah. Last episode, we kicked offthis new series. I introduced this improvement model that we canuse to help us set ambitious goals backed with a sound methodology.I think I made this disclaimer last time. I'll make it again thatthis is sort of like showing listeners a peek behind the curtainbecause we're sort of talking about this as this model is beingbuilt and used for the first time in my network of schools here inColumbus in United Schools. So I think that caveat's important, andI think maybe starting with just a quick review of the model welooked at last time would be a good refresher for this episode forthose that are reviewing and I'll talk through it for those thatare only listening. I'll go ahead and share my screen quick. Yousee that all right?
0:01:17.1 AS:Yep.
0:01:18.4 JD: Allright. Yeah, so this is the model we kind of stepped through kindof an overview last time. I think it's important to remember a fewthings. One, basically the core idea of the improvement model is itgives us the scientific way of thinking so that we can work in away that makes sense to close the gap between our sort of currentconditions in our organization and sort of our aspirations. So weframe those two things as the voice of the process, as currentconditions, what's happening right now. And then the futureaspirations, that's the voice of the customer. That's sort of whatwe or someone else wants those conditions to be. And what we'redoing throughout this process is stepping through the four stepsthat you can see displayed in the model. So kind of just steppingthrough those quick.
0:02:06.5 JD: Thefirst thing is that we set the challenge or the direction, andthat's gonna be... We're gonna dive deeper into that step today.Then the second step over on the left hand side of the model, forthose that are viewing, you work to grasp the current condition, sowhat's going on currently in your organization. And then the thirdstep is we establish the next target condition. So think of that aslike the intermediate goal that we're working towards sort of on amore proximate timeline. And then fourth, what we're doing is oncewe understand those things, then we're experimenting to overcomeobstacles or impediments. And so all of those things we talkedabout, doing that with a team that includes someone or peopleworking in the system, in our case students, a lot of the time,those with the authority to work on the system like the teacher ina classroom or the principal of the school building. And then thatSystem of Profound Knowledge coach that has that awareness of theSystem of Profound Knowledge and sort of brings that lens to theimprovement efforts. So that's sort of a quick rehash of the modelthat we went over in episode one. And then I'll stop. Well, youwant me to leave that up or I can stop sharing?
0:03:29.9 AS: Eitherway. I don't mind.
0:03:31.0 JD: Okay.Well I'll stop sharing for now and then we can always pull it backup if we want to. Yeah. So with that sort of in mind, what Ithought would be helpful is then do this deep dive into step one.And so kind of what we'll do through the next several episodes isfocus on each of the steps. So we'll take this deeper dive intostep one. Set the challenge or direction. So last time I mentionedthat in step one of the model we asked this primary question, wheredo we want to be in the long run? And this is... Think about thisas a overall challenge or direction that's set by organizationalleadership typically. So senior leaders, the CEO, typically theboard, they're gonna be the ones framing this challenge, settingthe direction for the organization.
0:04:27.2 JD: And wecan also think about it as a sort of a longer range goal that if weaccomplish it, it will differentiate us in our case from otherschools or if you're in the business community, it woulddifferentiate you from competitors in some way. But even thoughit's something that we're striving toward currently we're settingthis in a way that it's gonna stretch us and right now it almostseems impossible to accomplish this thing far out into the future.And this direction or challenge, I think it's fairly typical. Sortof set this on a six month to three year timeframe. So that kind ofgives you a sense of sort of how far out we're looking and thetimeframe we're looking to sort of achieve this challenge is. Andlast time I shared an example from our most recent strategicplanning where we're trying to reduce our chronic absenteeism fromthe current state, which is 52% chronic absenteeism. We're tryingto take that down to something closer to 5% chronicabsenteeism.
0:05:44.4 AS: Seemsnearly impossible.
0:05:44.5 JD: Itdoes if you're on the ground in schools right now, especiallyschools like ours, it really does seem nearly impossible to sort ofcut it at that large of a rate. So.
0:05:55.6 AS: I havean ethics class that I teach here, an ethics and finance class herein Bangkok. And I tell the students it's not mandatory to attendclass from my perspective. School may require you, but it doesn'tmatter to me. My job is to make it so exciting and interesting thatyou wanna be here. That's hard.
0:06:16.7 JD: Yeah.That's a good frame. That's a really good frame. We have,unfortunately we have so many obstacles that our kids are goingthrough to get to school. Even something as simple as consistenttransportation from yellow school buses is a major impediment toschool attendance here in Columbus. So there's all kinds ofobstacles that... Challenges in front of us that we're gonna haveto improve and solve to get down to that 5% rate.
0:06:43.0 AS: When Iwas growing up in Ohio, in Hudson, outside of Cleveland, the farmthat I worked on in the summer, Barlow's farm. Mr. Barlow was ourbus driver because there wasn't much going on in the wintertime.And so, yeah, he never missed [laughter] I don't ever remember abus not arriving in my whole youth.
0:07:07.6 JD: Yeah,yeah. It's something in many places you take for granted. And thenin a number of other places, it is a major, major challenge forsure.
0:07:13.0 AS:Interesting.
0:07:14.8 JD: That'scertainly the case in Columbus where we are, for sure. So when wethink about this challenge it's this... I kind of think about itand this is why it needs to a lot of times be set at the leadershiplevel or the senior leader level is it's this new future conditionand it serves as a sort of compass for us to follow. And that'simportant 'cause we don't have an exact roadmap for how to getthere. So it's sort of like a general direction, but the specificsare what we're gonna have to be filling in as we go through some ofthose other steps. Some of those intermediate goal setting, some ofthe experimentation that I talked about. But think about thisdirection or challenge is it's really the purpose behind ourefforts. And then when you sort of put together the tough challengeand then the scientific thinking, that's really powerful. And thosetwo things together can really sort of move you into this newterritory. I think that you're looking to... I think this mapterritory compass metaphor is really sort of spot on for thisparticular model. Oh, go ahead.
0:08:29.8 AS: I hada question because I have a client of mine and one of theirobjectives is to list their company on the stock market here inThailand. Like many companies, but in some ways that's kind of anowner's goal. Like we've talked about some of their other goals,like being the leading company in their field in asia, SoutheastAsia or something like that, and/or maybe to have a happy workforceor whatever. And I'm just curious, like how do people think aboutgoals? What is a good way to think about it? Is there such a thingas like an internal or a higher level goal versus a goal for thecompany versus an external goal? How do you guys think about thosetypes of things and target conditions?
0:09:17.2 JD: Yeah,I mean, I think... I don't know the exact answer. I mean, I thinkwhen you set a goal at the leadership level, then you're gonna...Well, one, you're gonna have to explain it throughout theorganization, whether it's a 100 people or a 1000 people or 10,000people. And then depending on the size, there's probably gonna bedifferent types of goals that are in different business units, I'mguessing by business type. We're a pretty small organization and sowe're pretty close to the... In fact, our office... My office, itis on the ground floor of one of our middle schools, so we're veryproximate compared to like a bigger company. So I think this canlook different in different places. I think the consistent thing isit's gotta be clear, it's gotta be spelled out, it's gotta beclearly communicated. It has to be something that you're talkingabout frequently. Otherwise you're obviously not gonna move in thisdirection.
0:10:11.2 AS: Yeah,I mean, that kind of answers it too. 'cause I thought... When yousaid that, I also thought about how people care about with them,what's in it for me. And so, as you said, you gotta explain it andyou're gonna have to do a lot of talking about it. So people needto see that that goal is something that's gonna bring them value,otherwise they're not gonna be excited to go do the hard work thatit takes to get there.
0:10:37.0 JD: Yeah.Maybe in that respect, like sometimes in education is... Some ofthe goals that we have set are so self apparent that there's justsort of immediate buy-in 'cause like who's against kids coming toschool? Almost nobody. So that's I think a fairly easy one to getbuy in. And maybe in other settings more time needs to be spent onthe buy-in part, the explanation part. Maybe... This can be kind ofhard, but who's involved in setting the goals in the first place?Maybe there's ways to get more people involved in that process.
0:11:10.6 AS: Well,and maybe the kids aren't involved in the buy-in.
0:11:13.8 JD: Yeah,that's true. That's true. Although, yeah, like the yellow bus thingthat's out of their control. And I'd say that's actually a majorobstacle. But I think...
0:11:26.5 AS: That'strue. Nowadays, I'm sure there's plenty of kids that wanna bethere.
0:11:29.5 JD: Oh yesfor sure.
0:11:30.9 AS: Butthere's obstacles all over the place for them.
0:11:34.3 JD: Thevast majority wanna be there, actually, I think. But your point isgood, and that goes back to that team they're the ones working inthe system and so they're gonna be the best at identifying theobstacles. So to stay in our setting, they certainly need to be apart of the experimentation that happens to improve the chronicabsenteeism rate. One other important caveat to point out at thisstep in the process, and we've talked about this a little bit but Igot this little chart that I think will help sort of explain whenwe were setting this direction or challenge, it's what I would calllike an improvement goal. And it's not an accountability goal. AndI think it's really important to be explicit about the differencebetween those two things.
0:12:24.4 JD: 'causethey often get conflated. And so I had built this chart for anotherimprovement project, but I think it does a really good job. So I'llshare my screen again. I think it does a really good job of sort ofoutlining the difference. And it's not that one is necessarilybetter than the other, it is just really important to know what'sthe purpose of this particular type of goal and what's it used for.And so I was just gonna take a moment to kind of run through this.So on the left you have sort of some key questions that areanswered either by... And here it says measurement foraccountability, but you can sort of replace that with anaccountability goal and improvement goal over there on the right.So you have measurement for accountability or accountability goal,and then improvement goals or measurements for improvement.
0:13:20.7 JD: Andyou have some questions that that particular type of goal ormeasure will answer. Then you have in the next row their specificuses. And then why quality measurement matters. So just startingwith accountability goals or measurement for accountability whatthose types of goals are gonna do is answer questions about meritor status or accomplishment of someone or something. Who'sperforming well, who isn't, who should be considered knowledgeableenough to do X. We're talking about end of line outcomes, like endof year outcomes. They're often... Goals for accountability oftenhappen once a year. So I've talked about this repeatedly, but statetests would be a very good example of an accountability goal. Thepoint of doing that is to separate the good from the bad basically,when you look at state test. Down there in the use sell for thosethat are viewing, it says the purpose of, or the use foraccountability goals is to determine the applications of rewards orsanctions. Right? And so it's none of this really has to do withimprovement.
0:14:38.8 AS:Sanctions, what a word, [laughter]
0:14:40.4 JD:Sanctions, right? Yeah. I mean, this happens in schools all thetime. Schools can be sanctioned depending on what the law is at thetime as it relates to state testing and accountability system.
0:14:50.9 AS: Ithought we only sanctioned Russia [laughter] Okay. So there's evensanctions in schools. Okay, got it.
0:14:58.0 JD:Definitely sanctions in schools. And then we can juxtapose theaccountability measures with the improvement measures over there onthe right or improvement goals. When we're talking aboutimprovement goals or setting the challenge, we're really talkingabout questions about specific changes as potential improvements tosystems like our systems. So we're thinking about questions like,are the changes I'm making leading to improvement? How are mychanges affecting other parts of my system? And what's measured isoutcomes and processes relevant to the object of change. You knowand how often are we doing this? Frequently. Much more than once ayear, like the state test. And the whole point is to learn our wayto a better system, right. And so with chronic absenteeism thiscould be both a measure for accountability and a measure forimprovement, depending on how it's framed.
0:15:57.8 JD:Chronic absenteeism is actually reported on state report cards, butin this case, I'm talking about an internally created goal that wehave for ourself that we've created for ourself that ourorganization is gonna work towards. And there's gonna be variousthings that we do to see if things that we're trying asinterventions, experiments work in improving those rates,basically. So I think it's really important to call this out thatwhen we are talking about this particular improvement model and thefour steps, we are not talking about accountability goals at all.We're talking about improvement goals, two very differentthings.
0:16:37.6 AS:Interesting. And the improvement goals is the type of thing that itseems like is not as common as the accountability. Like everybody'strying to, you do this, you've gotta achieve this, that type ofthing. Whereas this is such a bigger picture.
0:16:51.3 JD: Yeah.I mean, I think the key difference is because you could actuallyhave an internal accountability goal. You could set up a similarsystem internally as what the state does when they're looking atschools. And if our mindset was, we're gonna set this goal and youpeople over here go do this, figure out how to do it, that would bemuch more like an accountability goal. But our mindset is like hey,this is something we all gotta take a look at. This has to getbetter. This isn't working for kids, so what are we gonna do? Howare we gonna figure this out? That's really the key difference, youknow? You're not doing this for some other group of people. You'rea part of that group that's trying to make this thing better.
0:17:36.5 AS: So I'mjust curious too, as I think about the listener or the viewer outhere is how do they get started in this concept of setting thechallenge or direction and maybe there's people at the top of thecompany. I mean, the first thing that I thought when you startedtalking about it is Oh, there's so many target conditions, there'sso many challenges. Like there should be this one and that one. Andall of a sudden I started coming up with like three to fivechallenges. And then I thought, oh no. Now this isoverwhelming.
0:18:11.8 JD: Yeah.So in our strategic plan, we have 13 of these key metrics. And eachof one of those could be its own challenge or direction, but theyare divided up sort of roughly in like different department areas.And so some of 'em have to do with our fiscal responsibilityraising funds and stuff like that. And there's a specific team thatdoes that. And that would be different from like an academic teamor a school-based team that was working on something like chronicabsenteeism. So there is sort of a divide and conquer. The CEOmaybe our superintendent are focused on all 13, but there aredifferent teams that are actually running the experiments andworking towards improving these things. And then there's someonelike me that's sort of serving as the System of Profound Knowledgecoach across multiple teams that are working on each of these keymetrics basically. But in terms of where to start, I think that's agood segue. I mean, I think we've answered the question or we'vesaid that basically that this strategic challenge answers thequestion, where's our organization going next? And I think onegood... One simple way to start is to think of completing thissentence: Wouldn't it be great if we could dot, dot, dot.
0:19:37.0 JD: Whatis that thing or what are those things in your organization? It's,again, going back to it seeming nearly impossible, it's somethingwe can't achieve with our current systems and processes. It's noteasy, but not impossible. We think it's achievable even if we'renot quite sure how we're gonna get there. It's something that'sgonna be measurable. So we know if and when we get there. Andanother thing is that, especially when you're talking about, youwere talking about like communication of these challenges acrossthe organization, these challenges or directions are oftenexpressed as some type of catchy statement. So just a quickstatement that brings to mind this entire sort of area of work. Andso I was kind of brainstorming because we've been talking aboutthis chronic absenteeism example and I think we can just kind ofkeep that going throughout these episodes. So I was thinking ofsomething like, every student every day, and then everybody knowsthat we think it's important for every student to be at schoolevery day. And we're sort of working to get back to that postpandemic.
0:20:52.3 AS: Yeah.I was thinking, wouldn't it be great if every parent was firedup.
0:21:00.1 JD: Yes,absolutely.
0:21:01.2 AS: Aboutevery student every day. Like, that's the way I was just thinkingabout it 'cause I think that, and I just like the kids. I'm surethere's plenty of parents that say, I want my kids to get a goodeducation and I want them to get more than what I got, but I can'treach it or I can't do it. I got too much on my plate. But ifsomehow they were a party to this.
0:21:26.1 JD: Yep. Ithink, similar to the students, I mean, I think parents absolutelycan be a part of an effort where you work. And in fact almost haveto be, especially 'cause we're a K-8 system and certainly at thevery least at the K-5 level, kids are almost entirely dependent inmost cases on parents getting them to school. So, certainlyparents...
0:21:49.2 AS: Whatis the catchment area of your schools? Like what's thefarthest?
0:21:57.8 JD: Yeah,we have pretty, because we don't have a specific geographicassigned area assigned to our school buildings, like a traditionalpublic school district would typically. So we have much widerareas. So let's say, a 15 mile radius around a building would catchthe vast majority of the kids that attend. So, yeah. Yep. Well, Ithink, let's look at an example. Let's look at chronic absenteeismas our focus here. So, I've mentioned, we've just updated ourstrategic plan it includes these 13 metrics, and there's this onefocused on chronic absenteeism. And when we sort of outline the keymetrics in the strategic plan, each metric has four pieces ofinformation that we're listing explicitly right in the strategicplan. The voice of the process, the voice of the customer, theoperational definition, and then some type of visualization of thedata, basically.
0:23:04.4 JD: Sothose four things go with each of the metrics. So just as arefresher, a lot of people know this, and we've talked about this,but I think it's good to refresh. The voice of the process is themetric that tells us how we're currently performing. The voice ofthe customer is the direction or challenge we have set, so that'sthe step one. The operational definition for the metric putscommunicable meaning into the concept and includes a method ofmeasurement or test, as well as a set of criteria for judgment. Sobasically we wanna make it clear to anybody that's looking atchronic absenteeism, that they know exactly what it is we'remeasuring, and they could come up with that same measurementindependently. And then the fourth thing is this visualization thatillustrates the performance of the metric over time, because thattime factor is really, really important. So I'll share my screenone last time so that people that are viewing this can see whatthis actually looks like in our strategic plan.
0:24:07.4 JD: AndI'll kind of walk people through this visualization for those thatare just listening. So you sort of see this chart over on the leftor on top of the chart it says key metric three student success,chronic absenteeism rate. So that's the metric. The voice of theprocess is 52%. So that means that 52% of our kids are chronicallyabsent and the voice of the customer is 5%. So that's that far offthing. That's six months or probably more like three years off thatwe're working towards. And we're not quite sure how we're gonna getthere right now. And then we have the operational definition of theconcept of chronic absenteeism. So this says "a student isconsidered chronically absent if they miss at least 10% ofinstructional time for any reason. Our chronic absenteeism rate isthe percentage of students at United Schools who are consideredchronically absent."
0:25:08.9 JD: Now,this particular definition was fairly simple because there'salready a sort of a federal and state definition of chronicabsenteeism. And then down below the operational definition, youhave the data that we have thus far charted over time. So in thiscase, we only have three years of this particular type of data'cause that's when it sort of started getting measured at the statelevel. And so the y axis is the chronic absenteeism rate, the xaxis is the school year. So this chart has 2021/2022, 2022/2023,and 2023/2024 school year data. And you can see the data is fairlysimilar across those three years. Not too unexpected, but it'sright around, 53%, 54% in the '21/'22 school year, maybe 52% in the'22/'23 school year. And then slightly less than 50%, let's say 48%of kids were chronically absent.
0:26:11.5 AS: Justoutta curiosity, where was that before covid? Let's say2018/2019.
0:26:17.9 JD: Yeah.Lower. Definitely lower. I think going back historically, if we hadthat data, I would guess, and I'm sort of guessing based on overallattendance rates compared to what overall attendance rates are andlike what chronic absenteeism probably was, it was down probablycloser to like high 20s, low 30s, that type of thing. And obviouslya chronic absenteeism rate of 52% is very high. But when you lookat even the school district buildings that are sort of around theseschools, generally speaking, their chronic absenteeism rates areeven higher. They're in the 60, even into the 70% range. And so notthat this is like a comparison, but you can kind of get somecontext there that these rates are even higher in the neighborhoodschools that are closest to our campuses.
0:27:16.7 AS: Itwould be a bit shocking for someone in Asia, like myself in Korea,Japan, China, Thailand, who's, it's a much different view ofeducation. But just for the purposes, for someone who doesn't knowmuch about what's happening in the US, what are these kids doing?Are they out working or are they at home?
0:27:40.6 JD: It'shard to know exactly. I think one thing is, is that in some cases,older siblings, like in our middle schools, are often taking careof younger siblings for various reasons. I think that can be acommon way, but I think it's hard to just pin on one or two things.I think this is a very complex problem with lots of causal things,causal variables that are going into this. So I think that's whyit's so important to study it in our context and try to figure outbesides the things that we already know, like busing beinginconsistent, those types of things. What else is it that'scontributing to this? And so that's sort of what the process thatwe're starting now is trying to figure this out.
0:28:32.3 AS: Andwould you equate the voice, is voice of the customer equate it totarget condition? Or is there a difference between that?
0:28:42.1 JD: Well,in this case, the way I'm framing it is like the voice of thecustomer is that direction or challenge, that's step one. So we hadto, because this is an internal improvement goal, we decided forourselves, like what do we think that vision, that purpose, thatchallenge is out there on the horizon that we're not sure how toget to, but we want to get to in the next two or three years. So Iwould equate those two things in this case.
0:29:07.1 AS: Andwho is the customer in the case of a school, how would you viewthat?
0:29:15.0 JD: Well,so that can be a little tricky based on how you're asking thequestion. Just from the point of who's the customer and the voiceof the customer. Well, it's the leadership that set this like acustomer with a capital C, that's the voice of the customer interms of who's the customer of the school system it depends onexactly what aspect of the school system that you're talking about.But in general, our families and our students, are customers of theschool system. But then so are the high schools that we feed oureighth graders into. Those are also customers of the system. But interms of who the customer was that set this challenger direction,that was our senior sort of leadership team.
0:30:00.7 AS: Okay.And the voice of the process where we're looking at the 52%absenteeism rate, would you call that the current condition?
0:30:11.5 JD: Yes.Yes.
0:30:14.0 AS: Sovoice of the process, current condition, then you have to have someoperational definitions so that we know what we're really talkingabout. And then a visualization that helps people see kind of wherethings are at.
0:30:28.3 JD: Yeah.And ideally we would have more data than this, but this is the datathat we have. And you can actually see there's this note here'cause right now it's just a run chart. It's just the data pointswith a central line running through. But there's this note thatsays the natural process limits are not included until we have atleast five data points. And so we won't include the control limitsuntil we have more data, basically.
0:30:50.4 AS: Andfor the person looking at this from outside, they're like, so waita minute. You gotta wait a full year before you get that. But Iguess there's a lot of data underneath this that is input data thatwill eventually drive this output.
0:31:07.8 JD: Yeah,I mean, I think what we do with any data like this that comes oncea year, you have to find some proxies. So some proxy outcome datathat maybe you're measuring on a every other week or maybe on amonthly basis. And then you have some process data that you'remeasuring, here's the things that we think will move the outcomeneedle, and are we doing those things? So you set up differenttypes of measures, sort of intermediate outcome measures, processmeasures that are sort of measuring the different things thatyou're trying. And then usually a sort of a third component to thatmeasurement system is a balancing measure where you're making surethat other things in your system aren't, [laughter] going astraybecause you're putting all your focus on this chronic absenteeismconcept. So it's complicated. It can be complicated.
0:31:54.2 AS: It is.And in the area of education, you're under so many differentconstraints set by government. I was having fun in my mindimagining like when we were young, the Keystone cops, and they werekind of funny, crazy cops. But I was imagining getting an oldambulance with a flashing light and arriving at student's homes andsaying, we gotta get you to school urgently. [laughter] And all thefun things that you probably can't do.
0:32:27.4 JD: Yeah.Yeah. Well, that as a brainstorm is not too far off from some ofthe things that we're thinking about as possibilities in terms ofdifferent forms of transportation, taking more control over thetransportation where we can 'cause this is a service that'sprovided by the school district.
0:32:51.0 AS: Onething I did with Google Maps many years ago is I uploaded the zipcode or address of my students, and so that I could see clusters ofwhere they were. And then from those clusters, I startedrecommending, Hey, why don't the five of you guys form a group hereand you're in the same area? And then that would help them to makea connection that they may not have made themselves.
0:33:24.9 JD: Yeah,that's a great idea. We have the geo mapping already. Yeah. We.
0:33:29.1 AS: Andthere's pods basically. So pods are out there of 50 students inthis area. So when one has a problem you've got 20 of them that gota problem. If a bus doesn't arrive, is there a way we can get those20 students communicating with each other and say, we want to getto school, how do we do?
0:33:50.0 JD: Yeah.We said we have some beginning of the year challenges right nowwith busing and we were making some calls to some of the families,and one really awesome grandma actually said, I'm gonna look intohow much it costs to rent a bus and I'm gonna go round. And so thattype of problem solving is certainly happening on the ground. It'show to sort of make that systematic and consistent. That's thetougher thing.
0:34:12.5 AS: Yeah.Exciting. Great one, and I look forward to the next one. I'mlearning a lot and I know the listeners and viewers are learning alot. Is there anything you would just add to wrap this one up?
0:34:25.6 JD: Yeah,I mean, I just a couple points maybe to bring it home on set thechallenge, I think, one thing is we have to have this model tobridge a gap between current conditions and future aspirations. Sothat's this improvement model as a whole. There's always gonna bethis gap between current conditions and our aspirations. And Imentioned this improvement model has this combination of scientificway of thinking and working to close the gap. And what we did instep one was ask where do we want to be in the long run? And thisoverall challenge that we set is really set at the sort of seniorleader level, becomes a key priority. And I'm really thinking aboutthis. If we can figure this out and some of the other key metrics,it's gonna really differentiate us from other schools. And so Ithink that's sort of those four or five things are the key framesfor "set the challenge."
0:35:19.9 AS: Exciting. Well, I'm looking forward to the next one. Well, onbehalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I want to thank youagain for this fun and interesting discussion and really opening upwhat you guys are doing there and the challenges that you're facingmakes it even more real for the listeners and the viewers, and forthe listeners and viewers, remember to go to deming.org to continueyour journey. You can find John's book Win-Win W. Edwards Deming,the System of Profound Knowledge and the Science of ImprovingSchools on amazon.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'mgonna leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming.People are entitled to joy in wo
