Don't Just Do Something

What do you fix first when everything seems to need attention? Caroline faced that question while helping former students navigate life beyond United Schools. She wanted to jump in and start fixing everything, but she took a surprising step instead. In this episode, John Dues shares how a simple Post-it exercise helped them clarify what was affecting much of her department's work and gave Caroline a direction for her energy. Along the way, he and host Andrew Stotz get into "solutionitis," the danger of seeing too much, and why tempting solutions can lead us astray.   If you've ever felt the pull to just do something, this one is for you.   TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.1 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. Now, the topic for today is See Before You Solve, and it gets to a tension that I think we all face and leaders face. We know something needs to improve and our instinct is to immediately start figuring out what to do about it. Like, "Do something, don't just stand there." And John, before we turn on the recorder, you mentioned something about the alumni services department at United Schools and what you were doing with it and what was happening a few years ago. Maybe you can kick off with that.

 

0:01:00.2 John Dues: Yeah, I thought, well, it's good to be back, Andrew. And I thought it'd be interesting... This has come up and in my work, and kind of, applying some of these Deming ideas. The Deming philosophy to something real life sometimes can help kind of bring it alive. So I thought this could be an interesting topic for this episode. And for folks that... We haven't mentioned United Schools in a while, but that's where I work. It's a K-8 system. It's a bit unique in that our relationship with our students doesn't end after that eighth grade year. We don't have a high school in our system right now. And so what we do have, kind of the next best thing, is this alumni services department that serves those eighth graders once they leave our program and then go on to high school. And they not only follow them... The folks in that department... They don't just follow them into high school, but beyond too.

 

0:01:55.8 John Dues: So once they get through high school and they help them sort of navigate that, then whatever it is they do next, whether that's college or military, trade, or a career, we continue to provide follow-on services. And that department has a director that I work with on a regular basis. Her name's Caroline Durbin, and she was kind of a high school counselor and then came to work for us about seven years ago and has kind of built this department from scratch. And so she... Lots of things kind of went off the rails during the pandemic in schools. And kind of, along those lines, she's thinking about, as we're kind of, turning a corner a few years ago from that pandemic time, or at least the heart of it, she knew that her department needed to improve too. And I think the thing that she was struggling with, though, was where does she start? There's no shortage of possibilities when you run a department like that.

 

0:02:58.3 John Dues: She was th