In this episode of the Profound Podcast, I had the pleasure of engaging with Dave Nave, a multifaceted expert with a rich background in engineering, quality improvement, and business management consulting. Through his work and studies, Nave has delved deep into W. Edwards Deming's philosophies, applying these principles across various sectors with notable emphasis on manufacturing.
Our conversation explored Nave's initial skepticism towards quality improvement methodologies and his transformative encounter with Deming's teachings. Nave vividly described his early career experiences, where he challenged the concepts of process variability and predictability, only to find empirical evidence that humbled his perspective. This journey led him to embrace Deming's methodologies, seeking further education and eventually contributing to quality improvement initiatives in the defense industry and beyond.
Nave's experiences with the Deming Scholars MBA program at Fordham University stood out as a pivotal moment in his career. Immersed in Deming's teachings, he gained insights from esteemed professors and applied these lessons to real-world challenges. His anecdotes about the practical applications of Deming's principles, especially in the context of manufacturing assembly lines and quality control, were particularly enlightening.
The conversation also touched upon the challenges and nuances of implementing quality improvement methodologies within organizations. Nave shared stories from his consulting work, highlighting the importance of systemic thinking and the pitfalls of siloed approaches to process improvement.
Dave Nave's LinkedIn can be found below:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/davenave/
In this episode of the Profound Podcast, I had the pleasure of engaging with Dave Nave, a multifaceted expert with a rich background in engineering, quality improvement, and business management consulting. Through his work and studies, Nave has delved deep into W. Edwards Deming's philosophies, applying these principles across various sectors with notable emphasis on manufacturing.
Our conversation explored Nave's initial skepticism towards quality improvement methodologies and his transformative encounter with Deming's teachings. Nave vividly described his early career experiences, where he challenged the concepts of process variability and predictability, only to find empirical evidence that humbled his perspective. This journey led him to embrace Deming's methodologies, seeking further education and eventually contributing to quality improvement initiatives in the defense industry and beyond.
Nave's experiences with the Deming Scholars MBA program at Fordham University stood out as a pivotal moment in his career. Immersed in Deming's teachings, he gained insights from esteemed professors and applied these lessons to real-world challenges. His anecdotes about the practical applications of Deming's principles, especially in the context of manufacturing assembly lines and quality control, were particularly enlightening.
The conversation also touched upon the challenges and nuances of implementing quality improvement methodologies within organizations. Nave shared stories from his consulting work, highlighting the importance of systemic thinking and the pitfalls of siloed approaches to process improvement.
Dave Nave's LinkedIn can be found below:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/davenave/
John Willis: [00:00:00] Hey, this is John again. It's on the Profound Podcast. All things Deming, but not just Deming, everything really these days. I you know, I, I think in a previous podcast I talked about some people ask me at my age, why do I travel so much? Well, part of the reason is I get to meet, like, incredibly interesting people that I probably wouldn't get to meet if if I didn't travel.
And so a couple of weekends ago there was an interesting, you know, a lot of you have heard Bill Bellows on the podcast and he's fascinating, but he invited me to a sort of a reunion of a lot of people who've been sort of working together over the years. And I've gotten to meet the next gentleman, I'm going to let him introduce himself, but you know, fascinating background of sort of all things, you know, the kind of things we were interested in, you know, Learning organizational design, Deming, whatever, dot, dot, dot, Dave.
You want to introduce
Dave Nave: yourself? Okay. My name is Dave Nave. I'm a sole practitioner consulting servers, [00:01:00] business management, consulting, you're probably interested in how I Learned, well, wait, first off, let me say I'm a recovering engineer. Yeah, there you go. So I you know, my, my I'm trained and nature is as an engineer and my undergraduates in manufacturing engineering.
So I like to figure out how things are made, how things. And at first I started with mechanical metal cutting stuff, eventually got into assembly lines, and then I got interested in how do businesses run. I later, after about 13 years in the industry, I went back to get my MBA in something called the Deming Scholars MBA program at Fordham University, which was an executive.
MBA program, where the teachers actually came to us. It was the same eight students throughout the entire two years, and and we had three hour sessions from these various professors. Did [00:02:00] you did they, they said they came to, to you, did when you were at, you were sort of remote and they do remote sessions or?
Oh, no, no, I was long before remote was. Okay. No, I had to, I had to move to New York City. Okay. Okay. All of us did. All of us moved to New York City. And it was Fordham University at Lincoln Center, which is the south end of Central Park, and they ran out of room. So they actually rented a floor above a bank.
Oh, wow. So I, so I tell my, I tell friends that I got my MBA above a bank.
John Willis: That's funny. Well, all right. So now I have to ask, like, what, so you're an engineer, you're doing a lot of significant work and what, what was the motivation to go ahead and move to New York to do this MBA? To do this? And a guy called Deming.
Dave Nave: Yeah. Yeah. This was 1992 is when I did that. But in 1985, I was working as a manufacturing engineer. [00:03:00] Working on Assembly Alliance, making, making machinery, designing tools and machinery for making transmissions for automotive industry at a, at a sub supplier, sub tier. And I joined the company and they said we're involved, Ford is going through a big quality effort.
So this would be five years after Deming became aware people became aware of Deming and Deming started working with Ford. And of course, I looked at him and said, you know, I'm a manufacturing engineer. What does quality have to do with anything, you know? And they said, everybody goes through this, you will go through this.
So I said, well, you're going to pay me, I'll sit through a class. And part of the class was this old guy talking away in a lecture. It was that was all video. It was all recorded. And he, he said two things that struck my mind. And one of them. Was that all processes operate under I think it's called the Brownian, Brownian [00:04:00] laws of gas, which I've never heard of before, but it just, it says that molecules of air move around.
It took me 10 years to find out what it was, but all molecules move around within a certain space of gas, of gas. And it was, they were actually confined to that area. And the second one was all processes have a variability to them, and that variability can be measured and predicted. Now, I thought that was the biggest load of horse manure that I've seen, and I'm a, I'm a farmer guy, so I come from farming stuff.
Sure, sure, sure. And so I thought it was a bunch of horse manure. That isn't the word I use, but that's what I'm going to use now. And but I had I was in charge of an assembly line that made 600 transmissions shift on two shifts, and I was going to go out and prove them wrong. And subsequently went out and came back much more humbled.
[00:05:00] And that started me, getting involved and learning more about Deming. That's interesting. Out of the, Out of the Crisis had been published, and I started reading it, and it was a difficult read, and then I joined the defense industry in San Diego, and I read the book about two more times, and kept reading it, kept reading it, and then they announced that I was going to be, that the, the division I was working for was going to be moved to, from San Diego to Tucson, and 10 percent of the people.
. And I was not one of the 10%. So the, some friends of mine had been to a Deming four day seminar, where they had met Dr. Joyce Rossini, who was the dean of the program at Fordham, talked about this program starting up. And I said, well, okay, I will apply. And in a, in a matter of about three months, I applied and [00:06:00] was accepted.
Wow,
John Willis: that's amazing. So just if you don't mind me digging a little deeper, what, what did you find that was like, so you went sort of, I think the sort of greatest discoveries are the ones where you're convinced you're right. You then try to prove that you're right, and then you realize, humbled that you're not.
Is there any way you could summarize what did you learn about what you thought was right and what you learned were Deming?
Dave Nave: What I learned was to be a little more humble. There you go. And that, you know, and there's a lot, there's a lot. I don't know. There's a whole new you know, I was used to working with machines, but there's a whole new area that needs to be explored.
So that, you know, that one of the things they did was they had a, the company put together an eight point plan for process improvement and they were following that. They also found out that. They forgot a step right at the beginning. So then they had to add a step [00:07:00] zero, which, which says go out and make sure that the tooling is up to date and procedures are up to date and they mechanics have what they want.
And believe it or not, we found out that most of the time when you did that, the processes came back into control. Well, there you go.
John Willis: And anyways, but I personally learned that I need to learn more. I wanted to learn more. There was something more to learn.
I think that, you know, that's one of the common threads I think about, you know, sort of why people get fascinated with Deming because he, if anything else, It's a, it's sort of a journey for continuous learning, like learning about him and trying to understand what he was saying is just this never ending, you know, peeling the onion of knowledge, you know?
It really is.
Dave Nave: Yeah, yeah. And I, I learned later that he was, he was mainly observing things as he went along. You know, he had, he had a lot of knowledge physics and all that kind of stuff, statistics. But he would observe things that [00:08:00] are going on and he would try to understand why that was happening.
Yeah. That's great. Yeah, and try to put and try to actually attach some sort of academic knowledge. In theory, to it, and of course, you know, I was 80, he was 85 when I first was exposed to him, and so he had a lot of years of experience just doing that. Yeah, yeah.
John Willis: No, I think if you sort of look at, you know you know, the, the, some of the, the things written about his correspondence, it seemed like every time he saw something fascinating, he wrote a letter to somebody, you know, regardless of what, What space they were in and started a dialogue and I said, I suspect a lot of that's captured in the Library of Congress, but a lot of it's probably not captured at all.
Dave Nave: Yeah, I have no doubt. Yeah. But he was, you know, just always curious about everything else, about everything. And so you,
John Willis: you did that master's degree which sounds like an amazing program to really get immersed in [00:09:00] Deming. Any thoughts about that? Or then what, where'd you take that?
Dave Nave: Well, the, the program was actually, I actually have a, was awarded a master's degree in management systems.
And so it was a combination of the standard management systems MBA and Deming's. Okay. And what that did is that got me I was real fortunate to be exposed to some some great thinkers. And Dr. Deming died the last year I was in the school. So you know, I was there when they started the first Deming Institute meetings.
In Washington, DC. So I, you know, I slept my way from New York city to Washington, DC and attended. They had two a year at that time. So I did that twice a year. And it's just, it's just the mentally mental stimulation is what I get out of it. And I've, I have tried to help various companies and organizations.
And [00:10:00] with varying degree of success, you know, sometimes, sometimes they don't want to hear it.
John Willis: Yeah, no, I mean, that was part of his plight for many years, right? Nobody wanted to listen to him, right? So and I get, I think there's still a fair amount of people who are still not listening, right? Even more now, and it didn't help that every time he, and, and you mentioned in your book, he was absolutely help somebody learn something, but he did not suffer fools lightly.
Dave Nave: And inevitably his, his material was recorded. And when he was not suffering fools is what they, what they always broadcast. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. They call them a
John Willis: curmudgeon. Yeah, no, I, I, yeah, I think that was the, you know, he, I think especially in his later age, right. Like he was, You just, you know, like I, I'm like you, the first time I read Out of the Crisis, I'm like, you know, but I'd already been sold on [00:11:00] him, you know, I, a friend of mine challenged me to, to look at his 14 points, understand that, you know, and I'd been doing a lot of sort of working with large data center infrastructure, trying to solve, you know, the people problem, the human problems, right?
And, and when I was challenged to look at the 14 points, I was like, wow, This guy gets it. So I was already bought in and then I read out of the crisis and like, whoa, it's like, it was like almost, you know, putting the brakes on, like it wasn't, I think we talked about this, it's, you know, in all his blessings, but he wasn't great at sort of like explaining it in, in a, in a form that I think was, could be adopted or understood as well.
But, but I, I think that you know, if, if when I read, re read that book like you a couple of times, I, I get the sense that that was really, he wasn't trying to sell anybody a management help book or hey, bring me in as a consultant. He was screaming at America to say, you know, fix [00:12:00] this now, right? You know?
Yeah.
Dave Nave: He was, he was trying to save the American during, in the eighties, after the eighties, trying to save the American economy. Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. And it really was, it needed it, still needs it, but Right, that's right. I see more of it embedded nowadays in the different trainings and new students coming out.
Huh. It's not attributed to Deming, but I see a lot of the same thinking that goes on. Yeah, no, I
John Willis: think that I was going to say that you know, I, when early on, when I was thinking about writing my book, I, I, it's funny. I, there's like, I, I sort of joked that there's a a Tupac Biggie lean, like there's the Minnesota based lean guys who seem to like, they don't like dedicate their works to Deming, but at least they mentioned that the guy exists and has some influence.
And then there's the MIT Harvard group who sort of almost go out of their way. To make it look like [00:13:00] Deming doesn't exist and had nothing to do with with, you know, sort of Toyota and lean and all those things. And, and so I had asked Domenico Lepore, who wrote the, the go rat Deming book, why he thought that was the case.
And he said that he thinks he just pissed everybody off up at MIT and Harvard. So I,
Dave Nave: yeah, I, I don't know. MIT actually, did a video series. Or they invited him to come in and give a lecture. He had difficulty with it because he's used to lecturing to crowds and there were no crowds. Okay. It was just him in front of a camera.
Okay. And he just was uncomfortable with it. He just didn't understand it. Yeah, I can see that. But, yeah Jeff Leiker, who wrote some lean books of some sort. Yeah, yeah. Was saying really lean doesn't work unless you have a Deming culture in, in the [00:14:00] company first. And like
John Willis: is one of the sort of Michigan, you know, the like Rother, like her you know, anyway, it's just an interesting that there are some people like in modern day, you know, sort of you know MIT Sloan and stuff.
People come out of there seem to seem to sort of like. Make it look like he doesn't have anything to do with it with lean, but that's a further conversation. But so when you, you, you got your sort of a master's Deming, then you wind up, what'd you do after that?
Dave Nave: Oh, I, I've worked with a turnaround environment where they were turning around a company.
Unfortunately, it was not successful, which may turn around or not. Yeah. Yeah. And then I've been bouncing around. I ended up with a, I ended up, Doing a lot of contract work with a major aircraft manufacturer and doing various projects. And one of them we talked about at the, at the [00:15:00] conference, at the end to end thinking conference.
Yeah,
John Willis: this was fascinating. I, one other thing I love, so the end to end was, you know the Bill Bellows and a bunch of y'all have been meeting for years and I guess you had a hiatus, you know, For a number of reasons, probably Lisa, which were part of what shows the pandemic, but I felt privileged to be in a room with all these people who had great, like, sort of worked with knowledge and in real world stories about sort of Deming implementations and, and, and, you know, just, we were just talking, wanted to break out groups.
And you told me the story about working with a large aircraft manufacturer, and I, I'd love for you to sort of recreate it. Like you had a problem. You couldn't figure out how to, you know, sort of improve the process. And you sort of went through a whole bunch of anyway, I'll, I'll let you sort of take the lead here.
Dave Nave: Yeah. Actually it was a department that made the sidewalls on the aircraft. And they had say over 630 different [00:16:00] part numbers go through there from four different programs. And the, the this, this company had hired in the shingles, it's two consultants. And they had, they had been through there four or five times.
And the problem was they could not manufacture to the schedule. Now they, they went through, they did an awful lot of improvement. So yeah, I, I always, I should have couched it when I talked to you, but I want to couch it that when I walked in, it was in the middle of this, of the evolution of this program.
So they had already done single minute exchange of dye. On their, on their presses, which were actually, they got it down to 15 minutes from six hours, and that was good enough. It was too expensive to go to faster exchange, and they've reduced the routing tooling down to just a couple of pieces. And I was involved with the assembly area where they made the 600 and different six, over 600 different part [00:17:00] numbers.
And they were not able to make schedule. They sent the industrial engineering group through to look at all the different stations to see how they were doing. They were at about 25, 30 percent capacity. So they had lots of capacity. They could make much more of them. But they were just not able to do the to make production rates, which weren't, you know, anyways the one thing that, that I hadn't considered was the fact that there's a adhesive time, there was some gluing that went on and you have to, the glue has to sit there for a while.
And I, we were doing once again, another Kaizen event. With the Shingizetsu guys and they finally threw up their hands and said, well, all I can suggest is you make a warehouse and put these parts in the warehouse. And I was like, you can't do that with 635 different part numbers. So I, I kind of saw [00:18:00] that, that there was something going on that had to do not with, The individual pieces of equipment and nothing to do with lean.
So I started to simulate the how the parts go through a single shift, how the parts go through the assembly area. And I don't know if I was telling you, but I was working with the lean people and they And I started using pieces of hard candy on top of a desktop to simulate how this worked.
And it, it didn't work and I didn't simulate it correctly. And so for the next three months, part time, when I had a few extra minutes, I spent time trying to figure out how to simulate this. And I'll simulate the, what is actually going on in the, in the company. Now this, I could have done it on a computer, but I wanted to talk, I wanted to show it to You know, some of the guys that had been working [00:19:00] there for 40 years and we had some, you know, supervisors, managers, engineers, second level managers, and it had to be something simple.
So what I eventually did was got ahold of some Legos, figured out and then mapped it out on a flip chart, how it works, sat down on a, on a desktop and took the group through the simulation of how, how the parts go through, what they were doing was running the first platform through all once, and then the second one, and the third one, and the fourth one, and, and then all these parts were stacking up on the floor, and I came, and eventually I came back and said, well, what if we were to alternate these in, two from platform one, one from platform two, two from platform three, and one from platform four?
And then repeat that cycle all the way through. One of the advantages was the people that did the final assembly did the adhesive part of it. They knew all the part numbers. They knew both four lines, so [00:20:00] they were able to walk back and forth and it was not a big deal. And So I, and then I took the mechanics through it.
I took the supervisors through it. I had a second shift supervisor said I've been working here three months. I didn't realize that's how the, how the place operated, you know, and then When I showed it to the second level manager, she was on a fast track in this company and had been to Pratt Whitney and MIT as a, on a shared thing.
And she looked at me and she says, I've never seen the beer game in actual application. Oh, it's always been theoretical. You, you actually applied it and solve it. And so what we did was we changed the sequence of the parts that came in during a shift and the next day. And everything ran smooth as, smooth as silk.
And when they, when the it was a very large company. They had a very, lots of different [00:21:00] initiatives that were alive. And the Theory of Constraints guys got really excited about it. And the, one of the guys that had been Theory of Constraints for years, and had actually gone on to teaching locally, brought his students in to see it.
And they, they got all excited, but I had to explain to them very carefully It was, I didn't use the theory of constraints, I used systems, dynamic systems thinking. Yeah, like Jay Forrester. From Jay Forrester. And John Stearman's noted for, from MIT also, he's noted for the beer game. Yeah. Yeah.
John Willis: So, so, so walk us through to, you know so part of it was, was you had some sort of knowledge or education or system dynamics and Forrester.
Were you aware of the beer game or it
Dave Nave: was just that you No. Yeah, I was fully aware of the beer game. Okay. I had been through a couple simulations. [00:22:00] Some of them run better than others, but yeah, I've actually gone through it. So
John Willis: here's where I take the risk of being the the, the, the podcast E and ask questions where I can act like I really do know, but it's for my listeners.
But, but And so to me, it, you know, I, I think it sounds to me like the envelope game, right, which is what you're saying is they would literally, there's this sort of a very similar, but not exactly the beer game, but the envelope game where you sort of somebody creates you know, they, they, they fold all the letters, then they, then they wait till they're done and they seal them up on the envelopes and then they put the stamps in them and, and, you know, it, it seems like it would work, but there's all these sort of things, you know, like when you show it, when it's in a flow.
So yeah, so part is part of that. But then the beer game, I guess, add some variation to it. Is that what was it? What was it? What was it? You say the principles that ultimately created something that sort of like was not working through possibly theory [00:23:00] constraints or or
Dave Nave: through, well, the beer game. The whole point of the beer game is that there is a time lag between the different stations.
It's usually geographic. And every, every department is, or every part of the beer game, there's, there's four stations. Every station is, they don't talk to each other. They don't see what's going on. They have their own measures in place. And it's frustrating because it's costing money and it's, It's a simulation.
There's a, MIT and some other universities will take their MBA students through this simulation first thing, right where right when they start. And I saw one, one dean, or was actually as a professor, turn around to the students and say, okay, for the next two years, all of your professors are going to be trying to help [00:24:00] you understand so that you can operate in this type of an environment, because this is the way it is.
And for those that don't know, the beer game has at one end is the manufacturer, you got wholesaler, reseller, and, and, or wholesale, retail, and the store. And a slight fluctuation at the store level causes tremendous chaos upstream. And it all has to do with people making decisions on their local environment by only what they can see.
Only the little narrow band of the orders coming in and the orders going out. Right.
John Willis: And how did it, in the example where you sort of broke it up, where you said two here, then three here, then two here, well, how did, how did that sort of ultimately create the The optimal flow.
Dave Nave: Well, how did, well, what, what it did was instead of having [00:25:00] 20 parts sit out in front of the station that needed to have some adhesive put on it and cure, they would have like one or two.
And then one and one in the queue thing, and then 10 minutes later, they pull that one out, put another one in, and so it kept the all the storage. They didn't have to make all this stuff and keep it on the shop floor.
John Willis: Right, right. It was, in a sense, it was a, it was a, it was a breaking, yeah, breaking the sort of the bottleneck constraints, right?
Where again, like the envelope game, like keeping the flow going, right? Right.
Dave Nave: Almost like single piece flow in lean language. I've never seen the envelope game. So yeah, there's been a lot of simulations that the thing is the beer game has been out since the early sixties. So everything else is based on that.
Yeah, sure. Absolutely. Yeah. And man, John Stearman said the only reason they call it beer was so that the students would show up.
John Willis: That's [00:26:00] great. That's pretty awesome. You know, I guess the other thing I was going to ask you, so you've, you know, you've been doing this for a while, you've done manufacturing, you do sort of, you know, just looking at your work and your resume you, you sort of do this for just improvement in general now, so what you've learned from manufacturing and now just helping organizations, you know, improve process learning what are some of the big takeaways that you would relate back to Deming that you think work, you know, and I think we probably talked about some of them, but, you know,
Dave Nave: Well, let's see, what does it work?
They, they all have some, what I find useful is it's a combination of knowledge, educate, well, education and training, actually. And I can apply that when I go into a situation. I had one, I had one situation where I walked into it and somebody had already mapped out the, the process. It had a hundred and seventy some steps in it, [00:27:00] across platforms, and they were going to a worldwide distribution.
They had made three prototypes of, of what they were making, and they wanted to get times for these, these activities, estimated times from engineers. So, and they were having problems, of course, getting times, because, you know, they were I don't know if you've worked in engineer with engineers in that type of an environment, but they'll always find the worst case scenario and they want to give you that number or they want to expand that number because they don't want to get yelled at again.
John Willis: That's how you have a nature. Yeah,
Dave Nave: it's human nature. And a friend of mine had done with the theory of constraints project planning, something like that. And so I walked in and said, okay, I was told to go find out what's going on and fix it, see if I could fix any, fix it. And I said, well, I, so I went to the engineers and I said, okay, no.
Can you gimme an estimated time? [00:28:00] And, and you know, three is a bad sampling size. I mean, that's a terrible . I mean, it's highly inaccurate. But can you gimme an estimated a time when the process runs in under normal conditions 80% of the time? And we'll, we'll just forget it from there. You know, it's, I just need a number to start.
We're going to put mechanisms in place to catch numbers more accurately. We just need to start. And I found that the engineers were just more than happy to give me a number. So it was this, this estimating and, knowing that the understanding variation, knowing that it wasn't going to be accurate, but it was going to have to be, it's all we had, you have to, you have to use what you got.
John Willis: I think that's interesting because like that, that's There's an interesting theme. I wanted to talk about that recent article that came out, you know related to David Kivich, but but I [00:29:00] think that's, like, what I like about that is this idea of, like, I think we, we tend to always look for, like, give us the scenarios where things don't work, give us the worst case, and what is, like, the simple question that was much easier to get more accurate data, which was, tell me what it is when things are working.
Which is, in a sense, what Schubert had taught us, right? In a lot of ways, right? At least, yeah,
Dave Nave: well, yeah, somewhat. I actually learned that from a guy by the name of, called Larry Miles. He, he created what is now called value engineering. He called it value analysis in World War II. But oh, I'm sorry, it was later developed into something called function analysis systems technique.
Yeah, that was in 1960. And it's a mapping, it's a mapping process of the intent, not the process, but the actual intent. And, And that's one of the things that we talk [00:30:00] about is you try to, you try to describe the intent with two words, an active verb and a measurable noun. And when you map this out you map it out as, as one as a goal on one side and the other is the condition coming in on the other, on the other side.
And yet when you map this out, you get a totally different look at how, how it's supposed to run. I'll see the guy that guy taught that to me. Actually did that with a school in, they, they were refurbishing schools in New York City, and it took eight years to refurbish the school, but it only took five years to build a new one.
So he was, he went in and they mapped out what had to go happen in the refurbishment of the schools using that technique. And then assign people that were responsible, one person, one responsibility, and then everybody else had to [00:31:00] be notified. And it was a great map out of what goes on, because what they found was nobody was responsible for these different functions.
And the, they, they then turned it around so that they could, it's still going to take three years to build a new one, but they cut the refurbish in half. So now it only took three and a half years to refurbish it. Yeah. And I guess that's not as I fought as, as I fought around with my Deming background, it was only because of my Deming background that I could.
work with that group to learn that new technique.
John Willis: Wow, that's pretty cool. Well, it sounds like there's some thinking background too, right? Because not that the two are not complementary, but.
Dave Nave: They're very complementary to each other, so there is a lot of thinking, a lot of, of, operational definitions. That's a big, that's a [00:32:00] big part of it.
John Willis: I, I love that. You know, later it's funny, I, you know, the, the sort of peeling onion of learning things about Deming is, it was pretty late in my book where I really started, you know, digging deeper into the history of operational definitions and you know, where it came from, you know, Percy Bridgman and then sort of working our way into, you know, Schuette and And you're right.
That is such a fascinating discussion. And I, I find in a lot of and I'm sure this is true in every domain, but certainly in, in, you know, application software, systems delivery, all, you know, like IT compute infrastructure delivery, we are terrible at operation definitions. You know, we, we overload terms.
We measure things that really don't have clear definitions. I guess you've seen
Dave Nave: a lot of that in your, Oh, everywhere. Yeah. Everywhere. All the time. I'm gonna, I'm gonna tell you a, another story back to Deming. Sure. And one of the things that they taught us at [00:33:00] this MBA program was that, if you're going to do proper sampling, and if you're going to set up a, a proper study, statistical study, there are some things you have to do and and it has to be set up that, that you get good random randomness.
In your sampling and it goes like it goes quite long. But in another, in another project I was working on at this aircraft company, somebody did a survey at a, at a, at a workshop and then ran the numbers through the computer to get out standard mean and standard deviation and all these types of stuff and then was, was drawing some conclusions based on that.
And I had to step in to the, I pulled the supervisor aside and said basically what, what he said, the the statistical [00:34:00] part of it was invalid because he didn't set up the sampling correctly, but you're not, you're not making any major decisions based on this. So I don't really think it's worth explaining why.
And and she says, Oh, yeah, that's fine. They weren't gonna do anything with the analysis anyways, but it it allowed me to say basically. I had, I had to step in and prevent something. If, if it had been major, I could have stepped in and, and showed them how it wasn't, didn't apply. Right, right. I'm, I'm sorry, that's
John Willis: just No, no, no.
It's a good story. I mean, the, the point being, I think that that, you know, you've, you know, you've gotta be careful with just pure data or, I mean, it's the same, it goes back to the same problem I see in, in my world. People sort of measure all this stuff and they don't tie it to. You know, so the tenets of an operational definition, you know,
Dave Nave: operational or, or something in real life.
Yeah, or [00:35:00] decisions. I mean it really affects other
John Willis: people. That's right. That's right. Yeah, so you'd be real careful I think it it takes me into the you were telling me about That you you thought like so we we had talked a little bit about you know you know, we're both big fans of dr Deming so there's nothing disrespectful here But you know his his works were a little harder to read and you know, I think sometimes I think people You know unless you sort of fall in love with the concepts of things early on if you you know people let me Backtrack people ask me like what's the best book to read about deming and i'm usually like not out of the crisis as a first Yeah but you would mention david carriage as you know, you thought was a fascinating writer and And I hadn't really read anything of his until just the other day, and I, I, just on the one piece that I read, which I guess they published an article called Aristotle's Mistake, and I thought that was just
Dave Nave: I can't [00:36:00] comment on that specific article.
Okay. He used to, he used to publish, articles every now and then, and actually he was a statistician at the, in Aberdeen, in Scotland. University of Aberdeen. I think it is. Okay. And he has since passed away and his entire collection was donated to Beth Blankenship and and she is, has just started publishing and them on LinkedIn.
I think she's got about six or eight of them up already. Okay. I'll do a backtrack tonight. And Yeah, there are several David Caries would write it and his daughter, Sarah, would edit it. Okay. And they're always extremely well written, well thought out, never, there was no derogatory anything. Yeah.
[00:37:00] It was always informative.
John Willis: Yeah. Yeah. And so that, that sort of corpus of material, I guess, is really not public in, in, in the sense that, you know, we, we were sort of at the. Yeah,
Dave Nave: right now it's not public, she has, yeah, you'll find my fingers behind. I'm a behind the scenes person. I got that. I definitely see my, my fingers in the background and one of the, a couple of postings, Beth thanked me for converting the, the documents over because she inherited a bunch of stuff from Chibis.
Very computer she needed some help. Okay, there you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and I, I was more than glad to, to help her convert them. Okay. Alright, brilliant. And so, she gave me a little shout out, which was very nice of her. And I, I've, I've been after her to publish them. I don't know if she is going to publish a book on it or [00:38:00] not.
Okay, a collection of, you know, David carriage's work. Yeah. But he was back in the beginning. They had a Deming electronic network, which was a blog. And he was very prolific on that one. He would, he would publish things quite often. And everybody would sit up and listen to whatever he had to say. Oh, yeah,
John Willis: that's awesome.
That's awesome. Yeah, I'll be cool to track down. Oh, yeah, definitely. I'm interested in going back and reading what what she publishes or. Yeah, because I, you know, so far I've read that one article and it was, it was spot on. I, I reposted it and said, this is, if you understand, I mean, understand that particular article was about, you know, Aristotle was like, you know, sort of the you know, the, the, the things have to be for something to be in motion, it has to be sort of pushed, right.
And we, yeah. And, and so, like, the whole idea is, like [00:39:00] that, that we're always looking for the pushing of employees, the pushing of bonuses, you know, all the sort of anti patterns that sort of Deming would press and, like, more of a a Newtonian or not even Newtonian, more of a you know, quantum way of thinking, you know, so is, like, You know, how, you know, and the thing that was interesting to me is there's a lot of, I, I, I follow a lot of these resilience people that do sort of airline disasters and they, you know, safety, critical thinking and new type there.
And, and, you know, they're very much like, we need to look for the things that go right more than we look for the things that go wrong. Almost back to what you were saying earlier about, it was easy to ask the engineers, what's normal. And get more accuracy than it is to ask him what's abnormal. Yeah. It's the, it's the normalcy that, like, helps you.
You know, and he even, in, in that article, he said that you know, what, the gift that Schubert gave [00:40:00] us is we can understand, we can at least dissect from, you know common cause. You know, we can start trying to understand why things are in process, and that, that was pretty interesting.
Dave Nave: So. Yeah, Schubert was a fascinating character.
Yeah, forgot about that. Yeah. His, yeah, his book I've got both of his books and one of 'em was a textbook in my, in the MBA program. Oh, really? Oh wow. Okay. And what, yeah, and what, what helped me, and I didn't realize it when I was started to read it, was was he was doing a study. He was trying to figure out.
What statistical tools could be beneficial and useful in the manufacturing environment environment and his thick book? Is all about the exploration each chapter it goes on and he Ties in CI Lewis and his and his thinking [00:41:00] of Pragmatism
John Willis: yeah, you're
Dave Nave: well if pragmatism and and where does this really come from?
Yeah. And so he tied those two together, and his book is the big, the big thick book published in the 30s. was nothing more than his exploration. It was a study, and you'd get to the end of the chapter, because he'd go all through it, really analyze it. And you get to the end, and he says, this doesn't work.
You know, so you go on to the next chapter. And then he says, this doesn't work. And so it just goes on and on. And that's how he came up with X bar averages at the average and the standard deviation. Those are the only two. The only two measures that actually were, you know, mean and mode and well, I'm sorry, mean and average is the same thing, but mode and all these other, you know, the hypothesis hypothesis [00:42:00] testing that six sigma uses.
That's a bunch of malarkey because it, you know, it doesn't apply all these tools that the statistical community users. It doesn't really apply to manufacturing processes. Yeah. Yeah. I think and so once you, once you realize what the damn book is written for . Yeah. You can see, but in the, in the meantime, he explores, CI Lewis's work and the theory of knowledge.
Yeah. What does this really mean? No,
John Willis: it's, it's it's, it's amazing the, you know, the, you're right about Sure. Like the. The things that he put his mind, you know, of what he put together and how he drew from like so many interesting places to come to create that sort of one page memo, which, you know, literally, yeah, changed
Dave Nave: the world.
Right. So, well, that's, you know, and that's was the conclusion of all his work. [00:43:00] And you have to think, who is he working for bell?
John Willis: Yeah, you gotta,
Dave Nave: you gotta appreciate Bell Labs, let him do that.
John Willis: Well, I mean, that's like we could go on about Bell Labs about how many interesting you know, that, that was part of for many years there.
Their mo, they just let people, I mean, think about like, you know, in my world Kerrigan and Ritchie on C programming, right. And Unix and like all those things were investments made by Bell Labs. And even some of the AI stuff today, some of those investments, they allowed people to do extraordinary things.
On the time of, you know, for the sake, I mean, IBM's like that too, except like, you don't see it as, well, I guess you do, you do see a lot of those, some of those big companies. I don't think the house type of mentalities exist anymore, but back in the day, I think a lot of those companies felt that it was important.
Dave Nave: Yeah, I think it does. It [00:44:00] does. You just don't see
John Willis: it. Probably not. Maybe not. Well, anyway this was a, I had a great time and what, how I'll put in links to all your information, but what would you like people to know? You're getting introduced to a whole new crowd of people. They may actually call you from consulting and what do you want people to know or leave me alone or, or I'm always looking to help
Dave Nave: or no, I'm, I'm always looking to help.
I, I, Like I was saying, I'm behind the scenes type person. I love talking to people about the anything to do with improvement, Deming. I actually, I'm going to tell you another story. You can edit it, edit it out if you want. Oh no, go right ahead. I in the just before the turn of the century, I was working for a large corporation that had multiple improvement programs going on and they wouldn't they only supported one fully.
And I, [00:45:00] another guy and I used to meet at night where I was a group and we'd say, listen, all these different. Theory of Constraints, Six Sigma. All these things need to work together, and we can make the company much greater if we, if we would all work together and his idea in mind was to have a one week conference where we gave each six of these programs time to talk about what it is that they do, what's their process, what's the theory, what's the applications, and so they spend time and then wind up the conference with a, with a All in one group, and we can come together and figure out how we're going to work together.
All right, and this, and we looked, we looked for two years around the company to try to find the, find the guy. I wrote a, I wrote a, an email to the CEO and got a handwritten reply [00:46:00] back. That was kind of interesting. That cc'd all of his Anyways, so, come to find out, it was not, Was taken over by, the idea was taken over by somebody else.
They changed it so much that it didn't work. So what I did is I wrote an article. And it was published in ASQ Quality Progress, 2002. And it was comparing Lane, Six Sigma, and Theory of Constraints. And how it worked together. I've seen that. Yeah, yeah. Oh, my God. Yeah. That was one of the first ones written along that line.
There's been others written since. Yeah, I know. I think I've seen that one.
John Willis: Yeah. So you know, in fact, I, one of the things I, I, I'll go ahead. I'll finish your story. I'm sorry.
Dave Nave: Well, so what that has is a list of three. And I categorized a few of their activities as to, you know, what, what's their business level perspective?
What's their main theory? Again, in two words, try to do two word type stuff. [00:47:00] What is their application guidelines? What's their focus? What's the primary effect? What's the secondary effect? And most important is what are the criticisms? What is, you know, what doesn't it work on? And so that's what was published in there in the ASQ, I also went off to say that all of it ignores management and Deming is the, is the one that you actually should use if you're going to be, if you're going to implement these things, you should have a good management theory in place.
And Deming would be that one. But so I published this in 2002 and then I started adding to this list. I got involved with my value methodology or value management as he's workshops. I also got interested in ISO 9, 000 and the Baldrige criteria to the point where I was on the board of [00:48:00] examiners for the Washington state quality award, which is a exact duplicate of the national.
But the last one I added was Agile. Oh, wow. Okay. I have, I have this table, and if you want a copy of it, I'll be glad to give it, you know, send you an electronic version of it. Yeah, that would be great. Anybody that's interested, and you're going to put my contact information in there someplace. Yeah, I will definitely, we'll have all that in there.
Yeah, that'd be great. Now, the article published by ASQ, of course, is Copyrighted to them. They rewrote it. So I'll give you the, I can give you the draft for free. Okay. All right. Yes. I wrote it. I wrote it originally as if you were, if you were going to approach a plant manager who had these. Lean experts coming in trying to sell you a lean program or a Six Sigma program or a Theory of Constraints program.
You know, which, which do you choose? Sure. And that's how, and that's how it all started. Now ASQ took it and rewrote it to engineers. Okay. [00:49:00] So, and engineering language. Sure, that makes sense. I mean, I mean the content, the content didn't change. They just All
John Willis: right, that would be wonderful. I think we could get that up all, you know, all associated with this podcast and people could should know how to reach out to you.
And I think it would be a fascinating. I was going to say 1 of the things early on when I was writing my book is I wanted to find out what. What was Deming's relation? Yeah. So my, I was actually, I worked for GE capital for a stint. My wife was a black belt there. And and I got a green belt because just like in karate, they give you one for just showing up.
Right. So, but, but it was, it was, it was interesting. It was before I really understood Deming at all, you know, it was, there were interesting things about it, but then there were things that were so dogmatic that was just like, this can never work, you know, like that. That's, you know, that just, you know. I've told stories about, you know, a group, a group of ragtag programmers that were I mean, I could never come up [00:50:00] with my Sigma and, you know but you know, sort of long story short is that I wanted to find what was the connection between Deming and Six Sigma.
And I think it was from everything I read, he was not a big fan of Six Sigma, but it could have possibly been germinated from his ideas.
Dave Nave: Yeah, the history of thedo you have time? Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so I was in, Six Sigma started in, or Lean started in 90 with the advent of the machine that changed the world.
That was an MIT study. Six Sigma was started before that. At Motorola, and one of the things that they did at Motorola was hired in a bunch of Statistician professors from Air Force Academy. Okay. In Colorado Springs, and they came in and started teaching The [00:51:00] actual and pretty decent, pretty decent material, I've seen it.
On, on how, how to manage to variation, how to run your, your companies based on variation and, and understanding what, what statistics are telling you, what the numbers are really telling you to the point where our Motorola started making a it was, it was infamous at the time or famous at the time that they never repaired their pagers.
If it failed at final test, they threw them out. Okay, so they're making them so fast and so good that they didn't happen very often. They didn't fail very often. So then they so they, so that grew. And when that grew, some people got involved and they started to add more statistics. All the stuff that Shewhart was found out that doesn't work.
They started throwing stuff, throwing that stuff back in, and then they went to Allied Signal, who was also doing their [00:52:00] process improvement program, and they're the ones that came up with the belts. They had the black, the belts. So it's a combination of Motorola Six Sigma and Allied Signals belts. Oh, wow.
Okay. And that's where that came together. Oh, that's, that's really cool. And as I, as I watched that come together with my Deming background and all these other things, then they GE started having their. Master Black Belts, Master Belts, Black Belts, Master Black Belts, and they turned and it was supposed to be a hierarchy of knowledge and a training mechanism.
And, you know, the Green Belts were new people coming in. Black Belts had experience, had a couple projects. under their belt so that they could actually do something. Then they had master black belts, which were supposed to be multi group, multi whatever. They [00:53:00] were bigger level type stuff. But what I found was talking to the master black belts, all they were were program managers, and they didn't really understand variation.
Now, one of the things I talked, I'll tell you another story. Sorry, I'm full of stories. Yeah, yeah. Cut these out. I told you I was working for this major aircraft manufacturer. Sure. And I found the I'm always on the outside of these different programs, never, never invited inside. Because I know too much.
Quite frankly, I can cause too much trouble. And, but I got ahold of the Six Sigma guy. Then there was a Six Sigma program at, at this company. And since GE was a major parts supplier, they got all the material for, for training. And I, and I had the, and this was right at the time that they were bought by, they bought another company.
Okay so this aircraft manufacturer [00:54:00] had two separate Six Sigma programs that they were, they were trying to integrate. And this poor guy, he was trying to understand it.
And I told them basically there were two types in the United States. One Six Sigma program was statistical based, and it was all based on numbers and, and variation. The other, the other Six Sigma group was all based on teams. How to make a team. How to, how to operate within a team. And the problem was, neither one of them were, They both needed to blend together into one.
And so I told him that since they were using GE's playbook and all the material that as he applied that out in the, in the factory or in the company. You need to spend special attention on how do the black belts actually conduct their meetings. How do they interact with other people? How do they interact with the processes?[00:55:00]
Give them some training on what does it take to be a team and how to create a team. And he, he came back a year and a half later and he he said they did a study of all Six Sigma projects for the last year. Half of them failed. And half of the ones that failed, failed because they didn't know how to operate as a team.
John Willis: Yeah, no, you know, like, you know, I never really understood why Six Sigma didn't work when I was involved in it for that short period when I was at GE Capital. And I think you just nailed it. I think the idea of defects and variation, I mean, again, was the problem was so dogmatic. The black belts would literally, It felt like you were getting yelled at every time you went into a meeting, you know, like I, like, I'm a storyteller myself, but, you know, I, I remember having a group of about 30 people that did everything.
They installed computers, they fixed things, they, they were programs, [00:56:00] they wrote shell scripts, they did all sorts of, there were a ragtag bunch of people that kept the lights on basically. And once we started implementing the Six Sigma, I had to come up with my defects per million and all that, you know, my process and all and, and I like, and I, you know, I was trying to be a team player.
Like, I'd be like, okay, well, I think, you know, and I'd always every meeting I'd get shot down and my peer, a peer manager owned the server farm and his, his, like, sort of measurements were server uptime. Well, in this particular company, they spent billions of dollars, not only on multiple motor generators, but a battery farm worth a billion dollars that like the possibility of a server going down for like months at a time was impossible.
And so I finally got so frustrated with like getting yelled at every time. I said I said, I said, well, how about I like every time my door opens and shuts, can I use that? And they got real mad at me, you know, but like, [00:57:00] like, you know, you know, so, but I didn't really understand that was, they didn't, they, those black belts would just not.
train to work with people and teams and understand the dynamics. It was like this, this very sort of top down, you know, like again almost a Tayloristic approach to the, you must endow, you know, and I'll just go on just a little further. You, you, the, the GM of our division which was GE capital, which wasn't a trivial division.
You literally started learning her, her like lunch schedule, her coffee schedule because she didn't want to be in the hallway when she was in the hallway. Oh, yeah. It's like a school teacher drag you by the hair or the ear and take you up to the whole chart and ask you where you are in the process at this point, which fundamentally would be a brilliant conversation, except.
It wasn't like that. You were in trouble and therefore you [00:58:00] made it, you know, like, okay, she gets coffee at nine, she goes to lunch at 1130. Like, just don't go out of, you know, you were told when you got, you know, you know, people would come in like, Hey, new employee. Don't go into the hallway from 15. Do not be in a hallway from 11.
30 to 12. You know, like, and you're right, you nailed it. It was the, it was the people management. It was the team. It was the organization that, that made that. So the, the, well, part,
Dave Nave: yeah, part of the, what happened with Six Sigma, and actually it happened with, I saw it happen at late with Lean when it was implemented, and I criticized Ethereum Constraints guys a lot.
I says you cannot, if you're going to be accepted and respected inside the business community of wherever you are, you have stopped, you have to stop making your own language. You must talk to each other in the language of business. Yeah, not not in. Don't make your own language up. And this is goes back to the dogma.
And [00:59:00] that's what happened to six Sigma. And it happened with lean. We're talking about funny stories, but you know, don't get in the hallway. Yeah, lean lean got so silly. Same way dogma, right? That they want to do lean in the office. So you had to mark the top of your desk where you put your coffee mug. Okay, that wasn't the funny part.
The guys that got really pissed. Made a coaster that went underneath their coffee mug and glued it to the bottom of the coffee mug. So wherever they set it was on their desk was where it was supposed to be. That way it complied with the the lean principles. Oh, that's hilarious. Oh, because
John Willis: on the coaster.
Oh my God. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was the process. The process was not to get stains on the desk, so it has to be on the coaster. And so the ingenuity of humans was the fix was glue. The company.
Dave Nave: I love it. Oh, oh, it was funny. That's great. Yeah, I saw a lot of funny things like that.
John Willis: Yeah, [01:00:00] so let's do this again
but we should definitely do this again.
Dave Nave: Okay. I was going to tell you another story. Go ahead. Go ahead. Working for a, a different company, aircraft, still making aircraft, believe it or not, but in California.
And they were having problems. They were growing. They were going from one unit a month to one unit a week. Okay. With 2, 500 people in that division, that was a, that's a major change. Right. So they were hiring like mad. And, and they had work that was never finished in the fixtures. So they, and they complained.
So the four of us, actually four of us, I was an SPC coordinator, the TQM coordinator, and two other SPC coordinators. So four, three, we created a, an environment. And actually, we actually sometimes had to stand in the four corners of this manufacturing cell to keep people from walking in and [01:01:00] interrupting the mechanics that are actually doing the work.
Then we found out most of the mechanics had not completed the entire training program that they had set up. They had like a six week training program. Managers would come in and say, I need warm bodies after three weeks, and they'd take them out. And, you know, the, the it asked the mechanic, how come he didn't finish putting the rivets all the way around the door?
And he says, I've never been able to finish it before they move the product. And so we went and got the trainer, the guy that actually does the training for the rivets, brought him inside. The other part problem they had was tooling. They would have pneumatic guns, pneumatic riveters. I never want to hear a rivet gun again.
Thank you very much. If you ever go through an aircraft manufacturer, you might hear it. But after you hear it 40 hours a week for four years, I don't want to hear another one. But they'd have to get these tools and they would get brand new tool and it would [01:02:00] work right fine and work great, but then they had these old crap garbage tools that had been well used, not maintained.
They didn't work real well. So the guys would take the brand new tool, put it in their personal toolbox and lock it. And so the second shift didn't have it. Second shift couldn't use the new tool. They had to use the old crappy. So we got them all new tools, figured out what was going on, put the chat, what they call shadow boards.
And this was, this was before lean, actually, this is what I was called just in time. And, you know, one of the things we learned was somebody got the bright idea to take a picture, cut the picture of the tool out of the catalog and post it up there on the, on the shadow board. We, we learned not to do that because when you look at it across the room, you can't tell if the tool's actually there or if it's the picture.
Okay. It. Okay. So we finally got this manufacturing cell up and running. It [01:03:00] worked well. It started to work on time. It started to do fabric good quality work. And then the man, this is, we're talking about oh 8, 10, 10, 15 people on a shift, okay. Out of 2,500. Okay? So, so managers came down and said, oh, you did a great job.
We need to have this. In the rest the rest of the area, and these, all these other cells, we got 23, I remember, 20 cells, so we're going to take this guy and take one guy from one cell, put him over here, we're going to put the guy on the other side of the plant over here, and all this, and, and lo and behold, the cell that they pulled these guys from Went back to the old ways of doing things, didn't know what was going on.
And then managers would come down and say, see, we told you TQM doesn't work. Yeah. That's another, you know, [01:04:00] yeah, we can learn, learn from your mistakes. Yeah, no, it's fascinating.
John Willis: I'll tell one more story. It's like when I was a young, young, young kid in middle school or not even grammar school. You play that game where you you know, everybody has to duck the head and then three people tap everybody in the head.
And you have to guess who tapped you on the head. And there was this one guy that every time. They'd go to tap him on the head. He'd jump up and pull their arm out and say, you're cheating, you know, you're looking at me, you know, like, yeah, I'm looking at you now because you pulled the, you pulled my arm up from, you know, and the point being like, yeah, of course TQM is not going to work if you sort of pull the plug out, if you sort of, you know, pull the plug out right in the middle of it, right.
You know, it doesn't work. So yeah, no, it's funny stuff. So. Well, this was great. I thoroughly enjoyed this. So send me that stuff. We'll get it in here.
Dave Nave: Hopefully they'll find enough value in it. Yes. I'm certain they
John Willis: will. I know they will. Perfectly. I knew, [01:05:00] I knew that when I talked to you at at the in to in in to in thinking meeting. So, and we shall do this again, my friend. So. Hey,
Dave Nave: anytime you'd like.
John Willis: All right. Let me know. All right. Thanks, Dave.