It’s March. The initial adrenaline of the school year has faded, and for many school leaders, the data graphs aren't moving despite Herculean efforts. In this episode of Your Morning Boost, Adam Busch sits down with University Professor and educational transformation expert Dr. Doug Stilwell to discuss why surface-level changes—like new schedules or software—often fail to produce lasting results.

School leaders are working harder than ever—but in many cases, results aren’t improving. Why?

In this episode of Your Morning Boost, we unpack why common school improvement strategies fail to create real change—and what actually drives measurable results.

You’ll learn:

• Why surface-level changes don’t move student outcomes
• The role of systems thinking in school improvement
• What leaders can do differently starting this week
• If your data isn’t moving despite strong effort, this episode will help you rethink your approach.

So think back to those late August professional development sessions.

You remember these?

The energy, the fresh notebooks.

The new year, new us.

All of those slide decks with those jagged line graphs of every student outcome that every presenter has promised would look different by spring.

Well, here we are.

It's March.

The hallway displays are a little weathered.

The initial adrenaline of the school year has long since faded.

And maybe, maybe you're sitting in another PD session today looking at the same graphs.

You look at your notes, then you look at the colleague sitting next to you who's been through 20 years of these March shifts, and it hits you.

We've changed the curriculum, we've changed the seating charts, we've even changed the hall pass procedures.

But the feel of the building, it hasn't moved an inch.

It's that exhausting realization that were working incredibly hard, maybe harder than ever, inside of a machine that simply wasn't built to produce the results that we are dreaming of.

I'm thinking today about how we stop hitting the brick wall and finally start moving it.

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All right, everybody take a deep breath.

Just one right now.

Because we have reached that point in the calendar where the finish line is officially on the horizon.

We're entering that spring sprint, and this is that part of the year where the days get longer, the coffee maybe gets a little stronger, and the work gets heavy.

I know you're tired.

I know the to do list feels like a living document that might grow while you're sleeping.

But I want you to hear me.

You have got this now.

However, having it doesn't mean just grinding through.

We've all been there.

We've seen a problem in our building.

And our first instinct is to change the stuff.

We change the schedule, we buy the new software, we rewrite the mission statement and we keep making changes.

But if we're being honest, we're often making them in the wrong direction areas.

We're rearranging the deck chairs when what we really need to do is look at the engine.

Today, we aren't just going to talk about surviving until May.

We are going to talk about how to work smarter and not just harder.

And I'm really honored because today I am joined by a man who can tell us exactly why those surface level changes keep failing and what we should be looking at instead.

University Professor At Drake University in Des Moines, an expert in educational transformation and frankly, someone I consider to be a mentor.

Dr. Doug Stilwell, welcome to your Morning Boost.

Thanks, Adam.

It's a pleasure to be here.

I'll tell you, it is an absolute honor to have you here and to get us started today.

But for the educator standing in a classroom or in front of an office today, could you give us the elevator speech?

I mean, what is the Deming philosophy at its core and why should we care about it in our schools?

Well, I think I'll first start with my hunch is that when most people, educators hear the word Deming, they have no idea who we're talking about.

So typically in manufacturing, specifically, people would know that name, but educators probably don't.

So this would be a good introduction for them.

So the overview of Deming, I would say as much as he talks about systems and variation psychology, theory of knowledge, what I think about is it's about people.

It's about helping people to enjoy joy in their work, to get meaning out of it, to feel like they've made a difference, to help produce quality.

And Deming really defined quality as goods or services that contribute to the happiness or well being of someone's life.

That said, when I think about Deming and his work, I think about the idea of systems, systems thinking that the results come from the system.

Now, this is a tough one for folks because we've been so encouraged and involved in the Western culture to think it's all about individual effort.

And so Deming runs counter to that.

He says, yeah, individual efforts is important, but it's a system that's the most important because the results in a system come from the system itself and not so much the individuals in the system.

We're also talking about how to improve the system to improve results.

So it's not just about having a systems approach.

It is fundamentally to get better results.

And we do that by taking a systems approach.

And we'll probably talk a little bit more about what that means.

Exactly.

Deming would talk about let's look at the work that's actually happening in the system.

Rather than guessing or as you talked about, making some surface level changes, we would think about how is this thing actually working?

What are the nuts and bolts behind the whole thing that make it work.

Learning about data and variation is a key hallmark of Deming's work.

Understanding that there's variation just happens.

It's natural, it occurs.

And understanding when we should and shouldn't respond to it is a significant part of Deming's work.

And and again, finally, I'll just reiterate, it's about restoring joy in our work, in our teaching and in our learning for everyone that's involved.

Demi was a big advocate of the individual, and he talked about the individual being transformed, will have just more of a joyful experience in their work, whatever it might be.

Well, I'll tell you what, I'm really looking forward to the conversation that we're going to have today.

There's some great learning that we can do together here.

And even I think for our educators listening anytime, we can take little bits of this and little bits of that, which is really what Deming talks about.

It's not that we're going to be able to do all 14 of his points all day, every day, really, just some of the work that he talks about is something that's going to be able to be able to provide some positive work for us in the schools or positive change for us in the schools.

So hold on, listeners.

We're right back.

We're going to take a quick commercial break and we'll be back with more from Dr. Doug Stilwell.

So, Dr. Stilwell, this idea that the system is designed to get the results it gets, I mean, this is kind of a game changer, really.

Some of the learning that you facilitated for us at Drake, we've spent a lot of time talking about the transformation in our schools.

So can you help our listeners understand why we have to appreciate the system first?

And how does looking at our work systems change how an administrator or a teacher views their daily frustrations?

I have a sense, and this is based on my own 46 years as an educator, that as you mentioned earlier, we tried different things and we tried this, we tried that.

And if we look at data over time, we don't really see any improvements in the data.

And it's not because people aren't working hard, because they are.

It's a matter of not understanding that it's the system that we've created that actually creates the results.

So understanding the system helps us to learn how the system is actually producing those results, which sounds kind of esoteric, but if we back up and we think about all the pieces that happen, we'll just say in a school, from the classroom setting to how the building is arranged, to the people in the building, to the curriculum and instructional practices, even to how the custodian cleans the building, all of those things contribute to the results of the building.

Failure to understand that is a failure to be able to improve the overall performance of the building.

And that's something, as we talked about in class, is not something people have been trained in.

And it's, it can be a really challenging thought to have because we always think that someone must have been responsible for that bad thing that happened.

And it's typically the system, not the people in the system.

So understanding that's important.

Again, focusing on the idea that it.

Most of the problems, 96% of the problems in a system or the results of the system are caused by the system.

Very rarely is it the people.

Sometimes it is the people, but most often it's the system.

But it's maybe human nature to try to figure out who's to blame rather than saying it's something about the system.

So by understanding that we can improve the conditions in the school or in a district that create the conditions for success without understanding that we won't change any of the conditions.

And you talked about moving the chairs, right?

You're referring to the chairs on the Titanic.

Without understanding how the Titanic works or how it could have been avoided hitting the iceberg without understanding that nothing else matters.

And so my, and I mentioned this in class.

My concern for education is that we don't train people in systems thinking.

And because of that, despite all the best efforts, we're stuck.

We're absolutely stuck.

When I think too, I mean, what we're describing here is not easy.

And sometimes maybe society wise, we look for the easy fix.

We want to just get it fixed right now and move on.

But until we take that time to really truly look under the hood and figure out where that problem is actually originating from, we're never going to actually fix it.

We just might band aid it or patch it.

Yeah, that's exactly what we've done.

And understanding how the parts work together.

So in systems thinking, it's not just the parts, but it's their interrelationship.

And without an understanding of how they work together, we won't be able to improve anything.

Dr. Russell Acoff uses example of an automobile.

He says if we looked at all the automobiles that exist across the world and took the best parts out of each of them and tried to build a car with those different parts, we wouldn't even have an automobile.

So it's understanding those interdependencies.

And I think that teachers can do that in their classrooms, principals can do it in their buildings, folks at central office can do the same thing.

We look to see what are the conditions that are creating the results that we see in our systems.

And by the way, when I talk about systems, I'm talking about a classroom, I'm talking about a program, I'm talking about a district, I'm talking about anything that includes a group of people working together to achieve a particular aim.

Well, that's a great start.

We're going to talk about systems.

We're going to dive a little bit more into that with Deming's 14 points when we get back from our next commercial break here.

So hang on, listeners.

We're back a little bit later with some more from Dr. Doug Stillwell.

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Okay, listeners, this segment is brought to you by Grundmeier Leader Services.

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all right, let's go on ahead and get to the roadmap here.

Dr. Stillwell, we're talking about Deming's 14 points and one that stands out to me and one that we've talked about often on our fellow flagship show Control Shift lead is that 0.8, which is drive out fear.

We recently spoke with the school administrator Kanika Dorsey on that Control Shift Lead show and she spoke brilliantly about the need to shift our focus towards coaching and feedback instead of making every interaction evaluative.

So based on the frameworks that Deming has for us, how a leader really, from any seat, practically start driving out fears so that that data becomes a headlight to see the path rather than a flashlight to find someone doing wrong.

So how do, how do we do that as a school leader?

I think one of the things first things I think about is related to the work of Dr. Peter Senge and he's got principles for systems thinking.

And one is that there is no blame.

And what he means by that is in a system, there's no blame of individuals because Connecting to Deming's work.

It's the system that produced the results.

So that mindset of it's the system, not the people will move us away from blaming people and try to understand what about the system is producing the results that we're getting.

So that's the first piece.

I think what we can also do is make the purpose of data about learning and not about judgment.

We'll sometimes hear about schools that might post a group of teachers test scores with their names on it so the whole group can see it.

Unless you have a whole lot of trust and goodwill built up, that's gonna be something that's gonna generate fear.

So if we look at it as what can we learn from the data rather than who can we blame for the data?

I think that starts to remove some of the fear and tells us that we have a culture built around learning and not about fear.

I think what leaders can do is really look at things with deal of curiosity.

Again, what caused this data to happen?

What might we do to improve the data?

So being curious about the data rather than being judgmental about it will help.

When we create that safety, we can surface the real issues.

Right?

So rather than me being afraid to maybe mention something that may rub someone wrong, if I present it in a way that's not blaming anybody, we can surface those things and examine them to determine what their role was again, in producing the results that we achieved.

And another piece about driving out fear is it protects our pride in our workmanship.

If people are fearful, they're not going to have a whole lot of pride in their work.

And that was another one of Deming's thoughts, is how do we help people take pride in their work?

Now, let me talk about very briefly, if I might, a physiological reason about fear.

I did a presentation, gosh, about 10 years ago, I guess it's been now, for the Deming Institute at their annual conference.

And it was about fear and what happens to our body when we experience fear raising our cortisol, raising our stress.

In that regard, that response that served us well when we were living on the plains and running from lions and tigers, that served us really well.

We still have that built in our systems.

And so when we experience stress, we have the same things happening in our body, but there's nothing to do with it because we can't.

We typically don't fight or flight.

So it actually reduces what's happening in a prefrontal cortex, and we're going to perform more poorly.

In addition, there are some real health issues.

That arise when people live in a fearful or stress filled environment.

So that's a leader's job.

I'm going to post a lot of these things as leader responsibilities to set these parameters to make these environments focused on learning, curiosity and improvement overall.

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Well, and you were talking about that pride of workmanship.

And I know that Deming also I think calls that joy in work, right?

Absolutely.

And I mean I think that's really hard for us sometimes as leaders to understand that it's not just check it off, it's not just get the work done.

If we're really truly going to see quality work, we have to have pride in what we're doing.

But we also have to give people the opportunity to have pride in the work that they're doing by removing those barriers that might get in the way.

Yeah, sometimes I mention joy and work.

People think oh that's the fluffy.

But it's important, right?

So an aspect of Deming's work is psychology and inspiring or creating the conditions for joyful work is significant.

Again, we can't probably measure with numbers.

And by the way, Dr. Deming said the most important things there are can't be measured.

That doesn't mean we can't help promote them and manage the men's Taking pride in your work, experiencing joy is really, I mean if I think about my work, yeah, I got paid, but that's not really drove me to do the work cause I was gonna get the paycheck if I did A, B or C. It was a pride I took, the joy I took and the accomplishments that I was able to achieve with the people that I worked with.

So thinking about that again, as a leader, how do we help create those environments where that can happen?

Again, takes a systems thinking approach to facilitate it.

So we have a lot of paraprofessional support staff who listen to this show and they often see the scenes and of the system where that.

That handoff, frankly, fails at times.

Deming's system of profound knowledge includes this psychology piece that you're talking about here.

We're really talking about the human heart in the middle of the machine.

When we talk about knowledge of variation, then how can understanding that not every dip in a test score is a failure?

How can that help a teacher or a para or any of the people that are working with our kids find a little bit more peace and efficacy in their.

My hunch is that it's going to take a lot of unlearning because that's what we've learned over time and that's what's been reinforced.

Adam, I saw this dip in the score from last year to this year.

What'd you do wrong or what happened?

If we understand variation and if that, first of all, we understand variation is normal, we're not going to see the same results even from the same children on the same day.

We'll see different results for a number of reasons.

We have to understand that some amount of variation is normal and acceptable.

When we understand that, again we ask the question, what was it about the system that created all of those results?

Not just that dip, but all those results that you see?

And if you say, well, we did X, Y and Z and we're happy with the results, fantastic, keep doing them.

If you look at the results and we talked about a control chart, I don't want to go into that because that could drone on this podcast forever.

But if we understand that, we can see that there's something about the system that has to be changed.

Now, that said, teachers are in charge of the systems in their classrooms, but they are part of a larger system, which is the building.

So having that understanding that it's not just one thing in that classroom that produces the results.

We just talked a moment ago about pedagogy.

I think we're all in favor and believe that pedagogy, effective pedagogy, is important, but if it's effective pedagogy in an ineffective classroom system, we'll not have the results that we're looking for.

But I'm sorry, I kind of drifted away from your question.

Understanding variation helps us understand that it's a system and it's normal.

And we shouldn't react or overreact to one point that we see, which is something that's pretty common in our profession.

I think that's just it.

It is common, probably too common, because I know that's something that in the many years that I've been doing this, we.

We do have a tendency to overreact.

The minute something looks bad, we want to fix it immediately.

But like you say, it could just be a little bit of variation.

It might just be something that's just part of that process, but still within the confines of that system.

Yep.

So if people don't understand the concept of variation, as Dr. Deming and Dr. Shewhart describes it, we're going to be at the will of just responding to every data point.

And so again, if Doug was in charge of teacher and administrative preparation, we would learn about those things and look at data in a different way.

I think people are very well intended when they have data days and they look at it.

I'm not sure if they're making the most sense of it without understanding it through the lens of variation.

So in this show, we like to try to give people something to walk away with.

If a leader is listening to this and wants to move from, we'll say, fixing people to re engineering that environment, what's the first step that they could take right away tomorrow morning to help move along that towards that path of some true transformation?

I think the first thing I would encourage them to do is not to take any specific action to make any changes.

That would be the worst thing.

I think the best thing they could do would be to try to start examining the system.

And one of the best ways to do that is to talk to the people who are doing the work in the system.

So that means talking to teachers, that means talking to associates, the paras, talking to the custodian, talking to the children, understanding how the system is functioning before we make any decisions.

You can learn a lot from the people doing the work.

And we can say, right, you.

And I can say, well, I was there once upon a time.

Yeah, I was there once upon a time 30 years ago.

And it's not the same place as it was.

So really trying to get in to understand what's happening in the school, what drives people, the barriers that they see.

I think that's the best first step.

It aligns with what Dr.

Covey used to say, is that we need to diagnose before we prescribe.

And that would be a perfect example of Diagnosing the system.

Well, Dr. Stillwell, we're wrapping up, so thank you for being a partner in this thinking today.

I have an odd feeling we might want to try to do this some time because we just literally scratched the surface of some of the work that Deming has done that we turn around and use in our schools if people want to connect with you because I know you're really good about working with others.

If anybody's got any questions or want to follow up with anything that you talked about today, what would be a good way for people to get a hold of you?

Probably my personal email.

I am an adjunct at Drake.

I don't know how much longer I'll be there, so I'm not sure how much longer my email will be alive.

But they can get a hold of me at GD Stillwell and that is with one L in the middle and two at the end.

S G I L W E L L and that's your Gmail account.

Okay.

You're also pretty active on social media.

I see on LinkedIn seeing a couple

other places they could find me.

LinkedIn?

Yep.

I don't know what, I don't know what my call numbers or whatever are on LinkedIn so they could probably find me though.

Well, and we'll have your contact info in the show notes here as well.

Listeners.

And you can also get a hold of Dr. Stilwell through the forward ed network.

We will have his contact information out there for you as well.

Well, as we wrap up today's episode, I do want to leave you with the thought for your week ahead.

System change is slow and it feels sometimes like trying to turn an aircraft carrier, maybe with a.

With an or.

But just remember, you are the system.

Every interaction you have, every process you choose to follow or challenge, and every bit of fear that you drive out of your building is going to make the system better.

But as Dr. Stillwell said, you don't have to fix the whole school by Friday.

Just look for one point.

Can you be the one who offers feedback that feels like a hand up rather than a finger pointed?

If so, you're doing a good job.

And the fact that you're even listening to this tells me everything that I need to know about your heart for this one.

So take a breath.

You've got this.

Thanks for being a part of the work and for spending your time with us today, Boosters.

We really appreciate everything you do for your students and your community.

We will talk with you again next week.

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