Deming’s Journey to Profound Knowledge with John Willis

John Willis:
For an order of a Japanese family to buy a Toyota car. It was 70% of their yearly income. And he said he wanted everybody they, the Obi Wan Kenobis wanted to know everybody in that corporation, sweeping the floor, putting the brakes, putting the tires, painting the car that you were responsible for, your neighbor, your mother, your brother, spending 70% of their yearly income to buy one of these cars. And they wanted everybody to feel that.

Katie Anderson:
Welcome to Chain of Learning where the links of leadership and learning unite. This is your connection for actionable strategies and practices to empower you to build a people centered learning culture, get results and expand your impact so that you and your team can leave a lasting legacy. I’m your host and fellow learning enthusiast, Katie Anderson.

If you’re passionate about continuous improvement, quality, operational excellence, or lean management, you have been influenced, whether you know it or not, by doctor W. Edwards Deming. But did you know how this influence came to be and the profound impact Deming’s 14 points of management and system of profound knowledge has had on the practices of continuous improvement, operational excellence, lean, agile, DevOps, and so much more? To answer this question, I’ve invited John Willis, author of Deming’s Journey to Profound Knowledge, to the podcast. John Willis is an innovative entrepreneur who’s worked in the it management industry for over 35 years and is passionate about exploring and advancing the transformative principles of W. Edwards Deming.

Katie Anderson:
He started multiple it companies and is considered one of the founders of the DevOps movement. John’s also a prolific author whose books, in addition to Deming’s journey to profound knowledge, include the DevOps Handbook and Beyond the Phoenix Project, both co authored with Gene Kim, who is a guest on chain of learning, episode eight. John and I have known each other for several years when he first invited me to be a guest on his podcast profound, about Doctor Deming in today’s digital era, and then got to know each other more deeply when he joined my Japan study trip immersive leadership program in May 2023. For those of you who might not be familiar with W. Edwards Deming, he was an american statistician, engineer, and operations management consultant who was widely considered the father of the quality revolution in Japan after World War Two. His teachings on statistical process control, quality improvement, and management methods helped japanese industries and companies, including Toyota, which won the Deming Prize in 1965, significantly improve their processes and product quality and led them to become the world’s second largest economy in 1968. Deming’s principles later gained recognition in the west, reshaping management practices globally towards a focus on continuous improvement and quality assurance. I’d long known about Deming’s teachings, especially through my time living in Japan and the research for my book learning to lead leading to learn about the evolution of Toyota’s management culture from the 1960s to early two thousands through the lens of Toyota leader Isao Yoshino.

Katie Anderson:
But it was through my reading of John Willis’ book that I gained an even deeper appreciation and knowledge of how Deming’s wisdom and impact came to be. And I’m excited for you to learn from John’s insights and experiences now too. To get started, I was interested in exploring a comment John made in the preface to his book that it was only through the process of exploring Deming’s learning journey that he came to understand what Deming meant by profound. I asked John to expand on what Deming meant by profound knowledge and what he himself came to understand about Deming’s system of profound knowledge through writing his book. Let’s dive in.

John Willis:
You know, it’s sort of an interesting thing. And I get this. Even people who have like fell in love and followed Deming career, by the time I sort of understood Deming, I knew he was for real. But I’ve talked to other people and they hear profound knowledge. Who is this guy? You know, you know, like who does he think he is? But the thing that you sort of find out really quickly about doctor Deming is he’s very cat. Well, he doesn’t suffer fools well, right. So, okay, let’s get that out of the way. But he chooses his words really carefully.

John Willis:
Right? And I sort of kind of picked that up on, you know, like he didn’t, you know, when he uses the word profound, there was something more. There was a, it’s in the book, but there’s a point of which, I don’t know if it’s in the late eighties or nineties, a reporter asked him, you know, oh, you know, this, what you did in Japan and went on about, you know, all the things he did in Japan and I, and helped sort of the quality movement and helped Japan get their quality. I mean, a lot of things, you know, I want to be real careful and say deming didn’t create a miracle in Japan. Japan created a miracle. We’ve both got to meet that culture to know what that really means. But he said there was only one person with profound knowledge in Japan at the time. And so again, if you don’t know Doctor Demi, you think, here he goes again. You know, he’s the only one that was smart enough.

John Willis:
But I realized he saw the concept of profound knowledge as not something he created. It was this idea that there were these sort of things out in the ether that if you put them together in the right way. And one of the things I had read early on is he used the idea of taking a perfect picture with a camera. You get the aperture, you’ve got the focus, you’ve got the depth. And those are elements that. And when you’re taking a picture, you’re trying to capture some complex reality in the world. I know I’m getting a little meta here. And you have to use these little pieces to get that picture just right.

John Willis:
You don’t just snap a picture. Great photographer. And he used that analogy. And so the idea of this profound knowledge is there’s these, you know, four components or elements that can make up this sort of aggregate lens of how you understand complexity. And almost everything we do is as people who help organizational design and the way we think, these are like, I would say everything’s a complex system. I understood that there was more than just a slogan. It wasn’t just somebody came up with a clever way to get everybody interested. He saw these as universal principles and just says, now people, okay, what is this profound knowledge thing? It’s four pieces.

John Willis:
Think of a lens of trying to understand and break down anything. Complexity, solve a problem. And the first is what he called theory of knowledge. We know this. You know, I know you’re, you’re a student of lean and Toyota. You know, if there’s anything that Toyota was unbelievably good, is scientific thinking. You know, the theory of knowledge is at its core scientific thing. It is.

John Willis:
You know what? We’re both fans of Mike Rotha, Mike Rotha’s Toyota cotta, which is improvement. Carter. Right. Is how do we know what we think we really know? Because at the end of the day, we have theories. And then, so the theory of knowledge, and it roots back to epistemology. It’s sort of pragmatism. Like a lot of sort of interesting discussion goes into how we think we know things, right? And then the second piece is how do we sort of understand what we think we know, which is understanding variation? And there’s just been schools and schools of statistical process control. And then the third piece, which again, I think becomes this brilliant insight.

John Willis:
And I believe deming got this a lot from his early childhood or early sort of work. But when he went to Japan, I think he really picked up the importance of psychology, you know, and I definitely want to talk about your trip, right. There’s so much there in that culture about the intrinsic motivation. And we all know to solve hard and complex problems, right. We have to understand how the human is involved in it. That’s the third piece. And then the fourth piece is, you know, what he calls appreciation system, which is systems thinking. So he was an early student of systems thinking.

John Willis:
So his profound knowledge, his system of profound knowledge is based on this idea that there is profound knowledge which you could say can be encapsulated by these four elements. And it is a way to understand and solve problems, understand complexity. And so just to sort of wrap that all up, I knew by the time I got serious about writing this book about this guy that I had been fascinated for a decade, which was, I knew he didn’t make this stuff up. So I had to figure out the thing that makes the book interesting and actually made my journey through the book was to figure out where did all that come from? Where did he inherit his thoughts about psychology? Where did he, you know, first see that one of the earliest systems thinkers, you know, the work that he did with Russell Acoff and, you know, and all this stuff. And that was really the, it was my journey to understand, you know, why he was bold enough to call this profound knowledge and how to. And that was just, it was one of the highlights of my career is, you know, spending ten years and probably the last two years really seriously discovering those components.

Katie Anderson:
It’s almost like John Willis’s journey to Deming’s journey to profound knowledge. Right?

John Willis:
We’re all on a journey, right?

Katie Anderson:
And through your journey becomes our journey, too. I really enjoyed the book, not only from the deeper learning I had about, you know, Deming’s system of profound knowledge, but also, as you said, the stories and the real life experiences that, that shaped his knowledge and understanding. You know, like my book, learning to lead, leading to learn. It’s, it’s story based. It’s someone’s learning journey through their life and through their career. And we can learn so much through that process of discovery and learning and how then it synthesizes together. So from that human story, real life experience standpoint, it was just a fascinating read for me.

John Willis:
Yeah. I mean, that’s what makes your book so great. You know, I’ve raved and raved about your book. I think that the two things that we have in Kaka, I think we have a bunch of things in common, but is we’re learners. We love to learn like you, just to watch your face when you’re in Japan. You’re like a child, you know, from. Yeah, no, and it’s just brilliant. I love youthful, no matter who we are, where we are, we just want to learn, you know, and then we love to tell.

John Willis:
And then, you know, one of the gifts I think both of us found is how to tell people the things that we think are interesting in some form of story. You know, sometimes I always think I laughed at, yeah, yeah. They invited me to be a keynote because I’m the best juggler they’ve got right now. But it is, I’m a really good, I try to put really complex information that I learn and try to understand and I try to put it in a story that’s, you know, entertainment. Not, not, not a joker. But I think me, I think you and I have that a lot in common. Your book is a fantastic set of stories about, you know, Mister Yoshino. And when I was sort of sitting down and doing my research early on about Deming, I, doctor Deming, I just kept finding a, finding these like beautiful human stories, but they connect just like Mister Yoshino.

John Willis:
His stories connect to, you know, excuse, I’m going to steal not even a pun, but profound understanding of how Toyota worked. Right? And Deming was like that just as such a gift to understand him.

Katie Anderson:
This is really, you know, what you’re describing is what I consider that chain of learning. It’s like that we’re all learning through experiences and how we can share those with others and that shapes the learning, the knowledge and like making it generational and more expanded than our own individual experience. There’s something you said just now, John, and also that came out as profound for me in the book and it relates back to what you said about this link to Toyota. It’s about profound knowledge.

Katie Anderson:
And this is something that Toyota considered wisdom.

Katie Anderson:
And when they translated the Toyota Way 2001, which was an internal document trying to codify their culture of the Toyota way in Japanese, the pillar that we.

Katie Anderson:
Only know in English as continuous improvement.

Katie Anderson:
Actually consists of two words, wisdom and kaizen. This concept of wisdom really connects to the sense of profound knowledge and perhaps that learning that they had from deming when he came to Japan after World War two and really taught the Japanese how to do this and built upon their culture not only from the statistical process control, but from the human element side too. So wisdom and profound knowledge go together.

John Willis:
That is one of the things that’s great about profound knowledge is you’ll hear a lot of management theories that are great. Some are really, really good and they’ll have all components of the deming system profound, or most of the components. But to treat the human condition as a first class citizen was very interesting. And I think sometimes I think, you know, that when I look at, like, how we’ve interpreted, lean in the way, you know, like when you get down to, like, agile coaches and, and you start seeing it manifest, you start thinking like, what part of the human condition got left out of that knowledge, right, or this wisdom? And I think that was the, his grounding point is that you really have to understand the human. And I think, you know, and I know you’re such a great scholar of the Japanese. Maybe the next life I’ll actually learn how to speak the language. And I sort of, I’m envious of you in a lot of ways because I think about, like, if I really was going to learn, I’d learn more about the language and I’d learn the language better, but I think that they had the wisdom thing. So what, what happens when he gets there? Right? So for those who don’t know, you know, in 19, you know, after the war, there’s, you know, there’s a rebuild effort.

John Willis:
MacArthur’s over there. It’s like he’s had a whole sort of plan. I mean, you cannot drive on the roads. People are sleeping in the subways. I mean, you can’t get food. You can’t, I mean, at some level you can imagine the devastation because we all know what happened. But there’s a book called the Reckoning, and I got a lot of good information. My book, you read that book, you don’t really comprehend.

John Willis:
And so MacArthur is, he’s got to basically be able to make phone calls. They need to ride a jeep somewhere. They can’t do anything. And they bring in a number of people. But eventually, through some moves and sort of things get shifted around, doctor Deming gets over there. And so Deming comes in with this wealth of information about quality management. And the other thing that I think you and Deming would have got along beautifully, he loved the japanese culture, if you probably got that from my book, right? He would sneak out of the PX from the military base and bring food. He would, he would go to Kabuki theater.

John Willis:
You know, he would, he just loved that. And they loved him. They could see that he loved, he was the first one to go over there. It wasn’t just bossing them around. And everybody else is coming in, not that, hey, we’re the victors, but like, hey, we’re the military. I’m working for MacArthur. You got to fix that. Turn that off.

John Willis:
Yeah, but how do I, and this is a very inquisitive culture. In fact, Deming said these were the best students he’s ever taught. So the first couple of people that go over there are just demanding. Step there, go there, turn that. Yeah, but we read that you could do statistics. No, no, don’t do that. And Deming goes over there and he listens. And people in my book is this book, Doris Quinn, which I again, another golden story that I was able to find.

John Willis:
And I proposed to her that possibly Deming learned more from the Japanese then they learned from him. And she agreed. Right? So I think he goes in with this humanistic culture. He loves the culture. He has some great knowledge about quality that actually in a lot of ways helped Americans win the war. But that connection with the humanity, he was a humanist. And for him to see how that manifestation of how humans were, and we saw it on your trip, I recommend, I highly recommend anybody if you can get the logistics together. You can read about Lean, you can read about Kanban boards, you can read about this.

John Willis:
But you can just see how these organizations work together. The way I often joke, and I know it’s not true that Katie and Emil got together and they created Kabuki theater to make it look like it was so great because it’s uncanny how you go to each one of these providers. And so Demi picked up on all that, but he was in the right headspace as a person who truly cared about humans, to see that and deliver it. And I’ll say one more thing about wisdom. And a while back, Gene Kim and I did this. It turned out to be like a two hour sort of briefing seminar with me, Doctor Jean, a gentleman main doctor Woods, Sydney Decker, who are both prolific writers and thought leaders. Doctor Cook is now deceased. But about like safety, culture, resilience.

John Willis:
And we had Doctor Steven Speer and we were trying to see how like safety, culture and resilience. And lean, doctor Speer wrote high Velocity Edge and MIT Sloan, who was professor and at 1.1 of the resilience, people were like, okay, what did we get wrong about lean? And one of the things he said, which was so, again, I’m going to keep stealing this word, profound, he said that if you really wanted to understand, like he said, if you, if you got a chance to talk to what he called the Obi Wan Kenobis of Toyota, right? They’re really, you know, the ones that hide behind doors. You don’t really get to speak. They really understand he said, let me tell you why. They came up with the pole system, right? And he said that they wanted, at the time, before they even started producing cars in America, it basically, it was, and I don’t quote me an exact number, but for an order of a japanese family to buy a Toyota car, it was 70% of their yearly income. And he said he wanted everybody. They, the Obi Wan Kenobis wanted to know everybody in that corporation you’re sleeping for putting the brakes, putting the tires, painting the car that you were responsible for, your neighbor, your mother, your brother, spending 70% of their yearly income to buy one of these cars. And they wanted everybody to feel that.

John Willis:
And when do you hear those kind of stories in, you know, sort of western american culture? You just don’t. And so when we’re trying to force fit all the lean principles, in fact, you should know me better than invite me on a podcast, expect me to shut up. But one of the things that was sort of disheartening about going on to Japan’s study trip, which was, you know, maybe we’re doomed because, well, because, like, it was so innate in that culture. Even when we went to elementary school, the way they thought about their community, the collaboration and sharing. We come here, we put people through this. Deming talked a lot about in his books about how our education system is broken. They come out of high school, university, and they’ve really been engulfed in sort of a terroristic or very structured way. And then we say, oh, by the way, there’s this better way to do it.

John Willis:
Here’s the square pay. Start slamming it into that round hole. Whereas when we interviewed those children at the elementary school, and it was so in their culture, how communities, you didn’t have to convince people why sharing was such a punishment thing, why you should care about your brother, your mother, your sister when making a car or sweeping a fly. I don’t know. It was. I say that I’m a big fan of trying to help organizations like you do, but it was, it was one of the things I realized how hard it is for us in our culture. And the same reason deming had such a hard time, right? He’d go through his. Everybody thought he was the greatest, then nobody listened to him for 20 years, and then everybody thought he was the greatest.

Katie Anderson:
And then what’s that? The difference between that more individualistic culture, that at least the United States is pervasive, not necessarily all european or north american or southeast south american cultures, but Japan is such a culture of looking at the whole and collaboration. I mean, this comes from the rice farming days as well, having to collaborate with that. And it is so powerful to go to the schools and see how the children learn how to clean the schools, and that’s part of their responsibility each and every day. There are no janitors in japanese schools, regardless of public or private. You know, it doesn’t mean it always comes easily. And nor by any means, are all japanese companies super clean and tidy. There still requires the attention and intention to make that happen. But there are elements of japanese culture for sure that enable what we call lean or agile or continuous improvement.

Katie Anderson:
But there’s certainly some things that have developed in the japanese culture of wait, you know, wait for the boss to have the answer rather than, you know, it’s more of a command and control. So it sort of changed over time, I believe, and this is why I’m so passionate about what we do, John, is that we can make that change, but it requires us to overcome some of the. Maybe so we have some bigger hurdles to overcome, but putting the people first and really focusing on learning and people as the input to get the results that we want. And I’ve talked on this podcast about how we have it, like, backwards. So often in our companies, like, focus on the results and the output, you know, like enough foods, where we, where we go. The chairman talks about how profit is excrement. You know, it’s the natural byproduct of a healthy, functioning company. But if you focus on people, their happiness, their learning, you’ll get to those results.

Katie Anderson:
So, I don’t know. We have it backwards.

John Willis:
I was going to say real quickly, that leads to that. So the contrast between toy Jono and I don’t always get this perfect, but the sentiment is right. They asked Sloan at one point, he says, we don’t make cars, we make money. They asked Tocho Ono and he said, we don’t make great cars. We make great people make great cars. Right? Like, it’s just the way you think about. And just at some point, if you want to talk about. Deming hated looking at things by results.

John Willis:
He hated mbos. I would argue he’d hate okRs, but that’s a whole nother podcast. But he felt that the results were, like you said, it was the sort of, that wasn’t how you learned. What he was more interested in is how did you get the results? Let’s teach it. And it’s what Toyota is great about, right? It’s what Arthur talks about. They’re really good at when they learn. How do you teach everybody else what you learn.

Katie Anderson:
And that’s one of the things that.

Katie Anderson:
Deming was so influential in bringing towards Japan was this, the system of learning and what he, at the time, after World War Two called the plan do check act, but then later adjusted to the plan do study adjust cycle. So PDCA or PDSA. And that is the, like, the foundation of continuous improvement, continuous learning that the Japanese embraced so well, that concept of Kaizen. And I’ve talked about this on the podcast, like, the real meaning of Kaizen, starting with yourself, improving yourself, and an improving process incrementally, little by little by little. I want to go back, actually, to comments that you made about when Deming arrived in Japan after World War two and how he was so different than a lot of the sort of more command and control leaders that had been sent there to help rebuild the country. And there was a quote that really stood out to me because, and I wrote this down, I want to share it here with people because it really highlighted to me how deming showed up in the way that we’re actually trying to create people centered leadership in our cultures, in our organizational cultures. And you said that he came from a perspective of humanity and saw their potential for greatness versus all these other foreigners coming in with sort of like a command control leadership model. And you said he was considered a prophet because he could see what no one else could see.

Katie Anderson:
And here’s the quote you said, arriving at a difficult time for the Japanese, Deming never condescended to them. He looked at them, and unlike so many of his fellow citizens, he saw.

Katie Anderson:
Not their poverty, but their purpose.

Katie Anderson:
And then you went on to say he never made them feel inferior. On the contrary, he genuinely reassured them. If this brilliant american expert believed in them, they could begin to believe in themselves. And isn’t that the essence of leadership and what it should really be about? It’s like, how do you lift people up and connect with purpose and see some greater potential and then enable them to get there through, you know, all the process and continuous improvement? I just thought that was a really profound comment about Deming’s journey to profound knowledge.

John Willis:
Yeah, no, and, you know, there’s a whole interesting, you know, I get all these sort of sidebars. People come in and say, well, you know, it wasn’t Deming, it was Doctor Duran. Like, okay, but one of the guys, I was, say his name, but source. And he was the original electrical engineer. And he was, it sounded like he was a rough cat, you know, he. But like, again, first in, get the factory lights on, you know. Yeah, but can you tell us the theory? No, get the light. So, so, again, they all.

John Willis:
They weren’t all, like, just, you know, sort of nasty people. But here’s the thing about deming, and this is, again, I think is a common thread for you and I and a lot of your listeners and listeners. My podcast is that if you’re a true learner, capital l learner, like, it sort of changes every dialogue you have with somebody. Right? And he was a learner. And one of the things I, you know, after now the book’s published, I’m getting to meet all these old, I mean, people who worked hand in hand with Cenge, and it’s like, amazing, right? Like, people like, you know, working at Boeing, and we brought Sagan, and then we brought Doctor Golrad and like, oh, my God, no, stop. Wait a minute. Like, you know, I’ve heard, I was at a conversation. People talking about, like, yeah, Peter was great.

John Willis:
Like, Peter Sangay. Well, they all say this about Deming, that, like, if you were willing to take the sort of, the action of learning serious, he would spend as much time. He would work with you. If you felt that your sort of true, genuine goal was to learn. Like, he lay the car. He just wanted to teach, you know? And I know I’m like that. I know you’re like that. I was doing a workshop today on sort of gene of AI, and.

John Willis:
And this young man had a little notepad out, and people always ask us for, you know, hey, how do I do this? Can you give me some advice on this? He’s literally in his hand taking notes, and I’m like, I love you, buddy. Like, you are the kind of people I will spend all day with. And I. And I think that was Deming’s thing, right when he got home there. These people were smart. They knew things, and they wanted to learn. And when it came to statistics, you know, the japanese union of Science and Engineers, they were the wartime statisticians. While we had our Manhattan project and we had, like, Abraham Wald and all those stories going on on the us side of math and statistics, the juice, the japanese unions, they were all, you know, top notch, brilliant students.

John Willis:
And so they’re coming in, and he’s like, come on, bring it on, man. This is, you know, so I think that that idea that when you are a true learner, you know, nothing lights you up or nothing lights me up more than some young person who’s like, hey, do you mind if I ask you a few questions, John? And then they pull out their notepad and like, come on, let’s go. I love this. So I think that that was, you know, I think he was a respect. I’ll tell you what, though, if you’re a senior leadership, I’ve heard stories of him just tearing apart leaders at General Motors or Ford, who sort of made like SWAT statements. And he was not a very pleasant person to those people. But, but if you just showed that light bulb that you wanted to learn, apparently he just. And then go into there seeing these people, like you said, seeing that culture, loving the culture, loving everything about it, and then having group people just were just insatiable learners.

John Willis:
Yes, it was great combination.

Katie Anderson:
Well, speaking of continuous learning, you’re obviously a consummate learner, just like I am. I call myself a learning enthusiast, and it was really incredible to have you as part of one of my cohorts in Japan. And I’m curious about, you know, you shared some of your takeaways, but if you reflect, it’s been over a year now since that experience. What were some of your most profound takeaways that have continued to make an impact on you now, a year later, or even have influenced or changed how you think and talk about DevOps, or lean or agile, whatever the process methodology.

John Willis:
Is, I’ll start the easy one first. But the number one was in the bus ride where I got to interview Doctor Mister Chino. That to me like, oh my God, that’s so insane. But I’ll hold up on that for a second. You know, one of the things, a few of my friends, people who follow me and are like, know people like John Osbar, Doctor woods, these are people that really think about like, what happens when, what are all the complex conditions of a baby dying in a hospital or a plane crash. And, you know, Sydney Decker’s written just a number of books about the way they think. I. And you know, one of the things that you’ll never get a good conversation going with them is if you kind of ask them about an abstraction, you know, like, you know, Kennevin, which if, you know, hadn’t heard of it, but they’ll, like you say, what do you think about knave? Don’t like it at all.

John Willis:
And they would even engage in a conversation. And if you pull them aside, hey, come on, John Osborne, you’re my good friend. I don’t like distractions. They get in the way. Gene a while back called me, I was on a cruise, going on a cruise, and he said, you need to read this book. And it was Toyota cotta by Guy Rotha. And I read it on the cruise, right? I’m like, oh, my God, this was so good, right? It helped you. So.

John Willis:
And then, you know, and then I read doctor Spears, you know, all the sort of, then you get into all the lean. And then there’s sort of a cottage industry of books about lean, right? Some of them great. A lot of them sort of like. And it’s good because, like, Microsoft helped me understand things I didn’t understand about why Toyota was, people thought Toyota was great, right? Improvement, kata. Coaching. Kata. But I think the thing that I really understood is the thing that sort of John Osborne, Doctor Cook and Doctor woods would always say is we don’t like abstractions because they get in the way of learning. And this is sort of my.

John Willis:
And I think the thing that was so powerful to me was, even though improvement Kana and coaching on it and all, when I saw it unmasked, I just had a higher appreciation. And in some ways, you know, I kind of felt maybe I was robbed a little bit. In other words, I was real. I think I’ve told you some of this. I always be grateful for micro for writing Toyota cotta because it helped me see what was the big could do about Toyota, right? But then when you go there and you realize, because remember, like, all the conversations that would happen where people would ask, like, what’s your kata? Or what’s your KPI? And that poor woman who was the translator was like, you know, the whole week, she would, like, she knew she couldn’t translate it. She knew they wouldn’t answer it because they don’t even understand the concept of these abstractions. And then I think at one point, near the end of the week, I think in her mild frustration, she asked them, like, do you have KPI’s for your family? You know, like, stop asking that question. And I think our abstractions, so long story short, you got to see the unmaxed version of how people collaborate, how they communicated, how they understood improvement.

John Willis:
It was the real thing. You saw the conversations when the plant manager talked about how they hire local, local students and why that was so important. All the things that. Not all things, because there are some great writers, you know, friends of yours, friends of mine, but a lot of those things put a layering on it. And it wasn’t until I got the c in action, like I said, you know, if I didn’t know you better, I’d say, okay, we’re going to plan this next one where we’re going to go to this plant, and you guys move over there and step here and do like, it was like. It was unreal. Right, right. The way that it was just comfy.

John Willis:
I’ve got a comfy. How they just. It was a rhythm that was just so. Anyway, so that was the one thing is. And hopefully this is breaking through. What I’m trying to say is you get to see everything you’ve learned about that you understand lean and good things about how you would understand complexity. All the things that sort of all the great writers and the thought leaders that we talk about lean and the very positive things of how we interpret what Toyota did. But when you just see it in the DNA or in the water there, you get a whole nother.

John Willis:
Like, they’re going to the elementary school. That’s when they point, like, wow, okay, this is happening. I don’t remember. We actually got to do a little bit of Q and A with the kids. And they understood Kaizen. I mean, they understood. Not only did they sort of understand the community collaboration, and they cleaned the bathrooms. They stuff.

John Willis:
They serve food. Imagine mariculture, a mother going, my child, clean the bathroom in your school yesterday. But that’s not happening. These kids were proud. So that was the one, right? The unmasking of all the abstractions that we’ve learned about lean, just to see it in its sort of natural habitat was just like, it was beautiful. And then connect the dots of why it’s so powerful. But to me, you know, we’d been waiting for the time I told you, I want to interview this Yoshino cat man, because there’s been all this debate about Deming and, like, how it was his influence there. And there’s a lot of sort of east coast scholars that believe our damn, he had nothing to do with Toyota.

John Willis:
And we’re on the bus ride, and I think it was like, you looked at me and it’s like, you’re up. And I got to interview him. And at some point, I need to have this as a formal interview. And I asked, and he couldn’t believe that there were people in the United States that actually thought Deming didn’t influence Toyota. Like, we had to get past that. Like, no, no, I’m telling you, there are people that actually argue. And then he went in to this just beautiful, like, how he was. He started, what, 1966? I mean, he worked along.

John Willis:
He talked about, like, he was defending Toyota Ono. Right. You know, people say he’s a mean, you know, like he was. No, let me explain. Like, he worked with. We didn’t talk about Shingo, but like, he was there with Shingo and Ono Masimono. And he said, like, as clear as I could hear it, as clear as I understood it, which was deming taught us. And he said it was data.

John Willis [00:35:00]:
But I know what he meant was systems thinking, how to look at the data and sort of extrapolate all the things that are, you know, the deming sort of, you know, system of profound knowledge, you know, understanding a system. Like he said, we didn’t really understand the data part. And if you sort of understood what he was saying is it wasn’t just physical process control. It was understanding data to understand how systems work, how to do the analytics of how you do. So they had all the culture, they had this sort of the understanding failure, like the birth of Toyota, the loom and all that, right? But I think it was this guy to just shim in this little componentry about system thinking and in his words, through, he taught us to understand data. And I think, you know, that sort of like, you know, it just said it all to me to hear a guy who, like, you know, that was.

Katie Anderson:
There, you know, Mister Yoshino joined Toyota in the late sixties, right? At the same time that Toyota had won the Deming prize for excellence in quality control and obviously results at the same time. And that PDCA, that concept of a system of learning and using data, it was already so entrenched at the company, although as I talk about in my book, they still had to keep putting more attention to it, as Mister Yoshida will say, retighten the belt every 20 years to make sure that attention and that focus doesn’t change. But I would imagine, too, that as we talked about earlier in this podcast, that Deming’s impact on the human side and that human approach to leadership and its intersection with learning was also a huge influence on Toyota as well. It is why it’s not just the tools, but it’s that psychology and the people first that has made it so successful.

John Willis:
But, you know, it’s funny because, you know, like, it was a lot, there was a lot of translation things, right? Because originally Deming goes over there and he’s teaching Shewitt’s idea, you know, sort of Shewitt’s wheel, right? And then they call it the Deming wheel. And then at some point, Ishakawa, I think, and those call it PDCA, right? And Deming really never liked that. And later he sort of course corrected it to plan, do, study, act for a number of reasons. But if you think about that idea, of Doctor Yoshino’s answer of teaching data, thinking that their view of what he was talking about was this idea of this wheel, this cybernetics, if we will. He didn’t use the word cybernetics, but the ultimately becoming plan do study act, which is theory of knowledge. That is basically what he’s saying is he taught us about data, which means go back to the original thing we talked in Renders podcast, where he turned around the book. What are the components of understanding profound knowledge? How do I know what I think I know? That’s part of like he taught us to understand data. We don’t just look at data, say, yep, we won, it’s 90.

John Willis:
Great. And then how do we sort of analyze, how do we do analytics on what the data is telling us? How do we make sure that we understand what the human barriers around, the question of what that data means and what is the bigger picture? And so when I, and to me, when I sort of thought about Doctor Yoshino’s answer to me that he taught us data, what he was really saying is he taught us all these components through the lens of data. And what better way to understand things is what do I think this data is telling me? How can I analyze this data? Are there some faulty biases in the way I’m interpreting it? And what’s the bigger picture? And by the way, it’s a feedback loop.

Katie Anderson:
When I saw that or just heard this come for you again, too, how do I know what I think I know? That’s the same phrase that I was taught when I was learning a three thinking, which is an a three is a process for solving problems and communicating data and information in truly going through this cycle of learning and improvement. But checking how do I know what I think I know? And not seeing data is just something coming from a report, but how are you validating it? How are you going to see this concept of go to Gemba or genshi gambutsu, which is like, we have to also validate by showing up. And that is something that Toyota was really successful in doing, is not just relying on data from reports, but data from knowing and being there and seeing with your own eyes.

John Willis:
One of the works that I worked with Gene on, we called it beyond the Phoenix project, but we spent a fair amount of time trying to understand Google’s project, Aristotle. Right, which was, they spent, you know, I can’t imagine how much money and effort to try to understand what makes a good team. And it was psychological safety was the sort of the simplest answer the thing that I think most people don’t understand, like whether you attribute to this sort of in the ether, there’s this idea of profound knowledge, or what deming encapsulated in profound knowledge, or what we understand for the way we teach these things, it’s the great equalizer. Like this idea of the theory of knowledge, understanding data. It allows anybody, you know, whether you’re junior, what, what diverse background you come from, whether you’ve been working there one day, you’re working 30 days, it creates this beautiful ability to signal, I think there’s something wrong. So without that understanding of how you think about knowledge and understanding, it’s easy in most western companies to say, what do you know? You’ve been here a week, or I am such and such and I’ve done this and I’ve got this background. You don’t shut up. Or maybe not that bold, as opposed to nobody knows for sure.

John Willis:
Everybody has a theory, put it to practice, run it through the process. I think what Google found out in all that research, Washington, is at the end of the day, if you act like scientists in a lot of ways can’t completely solve the psychological safety problem, but it’s much easier to flow into psychological safety where somebody can’t sort of make a decision based on your culture, your age, your time at work there.

Katie Anderson:
It’s all science, and it’s showing up with curiosity and not blaming the person, but looking at the process.

John Willis:
That’s right. That’s right. That’s right.

Katie Anderson [00:41:14]:
In the last part of your book.

Katie Anderson:
You posed the question, what would deming do in regards to a lot of the challenges and big complex problems we face today? And you share some really great stories about how you apply the principles of Deming’s system of profound knowledge. I’m curious, what is your advice to listeners about how they can apply Deming’s system of profound knowledge? And what would Deming do today?

John Willis:
Yeah, no, I think, you know, it’s funny. I’m actually doing a keynote tomorrow at this conference, DevOps conference in Berlin. And that’s sort of what, it’s an extension of what Deming do, not only with sort of cyber and what we sort of experience of sort of the post, all the DevOps stuff. But I’ve been really struggling, I think I’ve told you, I’ve been for almost a half a year, I’ve been really focused on a new book about the history of AI. I’ve sort of shifted my day job into doing a lot of work with generative AI and DevOps in organizations and just having a lot of fun. Right. But I’m also writing. I want to write sort of the style of books I write is sort of very much like the way, you know, not as good a writer as Michael Lewis, but try to envision how would Michael Lewis write a book about Doctor Deming? And that’s basically the book I produce about Deming’s journey of profound knowledge.

John Willis:
So I’m trying to do the same thing, like chat. GPT isn’t just a miracle that showed up on our door story a year and a half, two years ago like it was, you know, 80 years in the works. Right? Yeah. But there’s some interesting questions about where we are, and I’m not going to spend a whole lot of time on the ethics and stuff. I mean, there’s too many smarter people, bigger megaphones that will try to dissect what the ethics of all this. So leave that somebody else. But what would Deming. So I’m really focusing now on how would Deming think about this? I was able to sit back, I knew enough about Deming and think about cyber terrorism.

John Willis:
I had great friends, you know, they talk about Shannon Leeds, and, you know, a lot of really great thinkers have done incredible stuff, and I was able to share my ideas with them and be able to really put the last start of the book. I think Deming would basically do this, do this and do this. I’ve been struggling a little thing about how he would think about degenerative AI. And tomorrow’s the first time I’m actually going to do a presentation where I want to start talking about erotetics, which is, again, a crazy, but it’s how language like, he was very, you know, operational definitions was a really big part of his cadre of knowledge. Like when we use words, if you’ve read Doctor Wheeler’s books, right, and like how we use words and what that word means and like the operational definitions, all that. And I think now more than ever, as we make this shift from very determined, or I at least proposed deterministic ways to instruct the world to work programming to a very natural language, non deterministic. I think he would really be intrigued about, I think more than ever now, this is one of the threads. He would think a lot about how we think about talking to everybody, assuming these new computers are not, I’m not buying any into the whole AGI thing, but they are sort of substitutes for humans.

John Willis:
And so a lot of what we’re doing about instructing things to work and do things is going to be through our language, you know, if now more than ever we cared about, like, being clear about how we use words, what words mean, what are the underpinnings of those words? So anyway, a good friend of mine, Jay Bloom, I got to sit in on his dissertation. Ten years he was working on his PhD. But he spends a lot of time talking about, like, you know, the sort of the art of language in the art of questions, and how questions are important. Anyway, I think there’s a lot there. If we take for granted that a lot of how we’re going to communicate with technology is through natural language, that’s a given, right? We’re seeing that already, then we probably. He would probably, hey, everybody, let’s step back. And more than ever, let’s try to understand what operational definitions mean, what they talk about, how the words we choose now, and how we sort of convey how we communicate those words anyway. So I think there’s a lot there.

John Willis [00:45:29]:
There’s a lot about probability. These are all probabilistic models. He was his business card says statistician. So I’m really trying to rock into how would he see this? And it’s so early in its evolution, the generation space. It’s hard to just say, he would do this, he would do this, this. But early on, I think it is about how we ask questions, how we answer questions, how we think about the words we use to ask questions. I think he’d be a little bit alarmed about knowing we haven’t done a great job to date.

Katie Anderson:
Well, it all goes back to where we started, where you’re saying the system of profound knowledge are these four interconnected lenses that we can use to really understand theory of knowledge. How do you know what you know? How do you understand variation, the psychology? How are you asking those questions and really using language and the human behavior behind it, even if it’s, you know, bringing in technology and then the interconnectedness of all of these systems, and if we only look at one, say, you know, only look at variation, or only look at doing, you know, continuous improvement cycles, we’re missing the totality that’s really going to create that profound knowledge. Right?

John Willis:
I’ve gotten yelled at a couple of times, and I get why people get mad. In a perfect world where nobody ever yells at you, I’d almost like to call the appreciation of a system the fourth discipline. In other words, it is the wrapper for the other three. But then if you really understand deming, they would argue, and rightfully so, that you use them all. Together in conjunction and you don’t sort of isolate. And so I get the anti argument. But I do think, you know, that systems thinking is such a critical component for everything we do. And to me, like, like Peter Senge’s fifth discipline, you know, he saw the power of, like, everything sort of got wrapped in a bow by that.

John Willis:
So. But, yeah, I think, you know, thank you for that because I want to rethink that. Like, you know, sometimes it’s right in front of my face. Like, the whole idea of, like, how are we evolving our communication with these large language models and are we applying the system profound knowledge to every aspect of it? And even right there I’m thinking, you know, I’m not even really doing a great job exploring that. So thank you for that.

Katie Anderson:
It’s all about asking the right questions.

Katie Anderson:
Right. Well, we could continue to have many more hours of conversation here. John and I look forward to our continued collaboration and learning together. Having you join me again, hopefully in Japan, as you’ve mentioned, is on your second, your bucket list again, and really excited to hear what you continue to explore with this new book. And I really recommend people take a look at John’s book, Deming’s journey to profound knowledge because it really is those stories about how he learned and created and came up with at the age of, what, 93. This is the system which was literally the capstone and culmination of 90 plus years of learning.

John Willis:
You know, Katie, it’s been a gift getting to know you, honestly, because I think that as I get older, I get grumpier. I’ve always been grumpy, but people I recognize when I see their face on or I hear their name, I immediately have a smile on my face. And you’re one of those people. And, you know, and that just tells me there’s something special about you. Right? Because I’m not like, oh, that person again. Like every time I see something that you write and you, you sort of radiate that. So you, you are sort of a gift of somebody to get to know. And I, you know, I don’t have to say any of that.

John Willis:
I just, I think it’s a true statement and I think most people who know you and listen to you know that themselves.

Katie Anderson:
Well, thank you, John. I appreciate that. And my, my energy comes from really creating and building this chain of learning by sharing knowledge and insights and caring about each other. And so I’m really happy that you’re part of my chain of learning. And thank you for coming on chain of learning, the podcast here today.

John Willis:
It was great. Thank you.

Katie Anderson:
As John highlights in this episode, a commitment to lifelong learning and a quest for knowledge. Profound knowledge through asking better questions, understanding the broader system and focusing on people is the way that you’ll be able to impact meaningful change in your organization and this world. Be sure to check out John’s book Deming’s journey to profound knowledge to get an enriched understanding of Deming’s learning journey in the impact he made on you, me, and everyone else passionate about creating people centered learning, organizational cultures and solving complex problems. In this episode, John and I touch on many topics that we’ve explored on past episodes of chain of learning that you might be interested in. In particular, check out episode 16 with Mark Graben where he and I talk about the importance of systems thinking, understanding variation, and psychological safety. In episode eight, where I talk with John’s co author Gene Kim and professor Steve Speer about how to wire a winning organization. I’ll also put links to other podcast episodes and articles, as well as how to connect with John Willis and get his book Demings journey to profound knowledge in the full episode. Show notes as you reflect on this episode, think about how Deming’s system of profound knowledge, its interconnected theories of knowledge, variation, psychology, and systems, can help you solve the complex organizational issues that are in front of you.

Katie Anderson:
And importantly, ask yourself, how do you know what you know and what do you need to know and how will you learn it? Go see, ask questions, and experiment your way forward. And if you haven’t already done so, be sure to download my free change Katalyst leadership self assessment that covers eight competencies that you need to master to be an impactful change leader, including being an analytical systems thinker and a lifelong learning enthusiast. As John mentioned here in this episode, go to kbjanderson.com Katalyst spelled with a ‘k’ and discover how you can grow the skills you need to make the impact you want. And if you need outside support for yourself or your leaders to make progress on developing the skills and systems to create a culture of learning in your organization, I’d love to help. You can learn more about my trusted advisor services, leadership development experiences, and immersive Japan study trip programs on my website, kbjanderson.com. the link is also in the show notes be sure to follow or subscribe Chain of Learning and share this podcast with your friends and colleagues so we can all strengthen our chain of learning together. And if you’re enjoying the show, please rate and review it on your favorite podcast player. Thanks for being a link in my chain of learning today.

Katie Anderson:
I’ll see you next time. Have a great day.