Years ago when someone asked Dr. Deming about Plan-Do-Check-Act, he, as he was prone to do when he thought someone was not listening, responded in an agitated way. He said, “I never said check!” Since then, I have never said Check. It is the Plan-Do-Study-Act or, better yet, the Shewhart cycle for learning and improvement. It is my favorite way to understand and describe scientific method and to both learn about and improve systems.

A recent conversation with my wife, Carole, and our daughter, Lisa, focused on the idea of listening and on doing what gives you joy. Since those early days with Dr. Deming, my default approach to any problem or opportunity has usually been PDSA, but the conversation with Carole and Lisa made me realize that my interpretation of that cycle has changed substantially over the years.

Plan

I now start the cycle by listening. Maybe I always did, but these days I’m more aware of it.

At the beginning of my using PDSA, when an opportunity for improvement came to my attention, I would investigate what was going on and try to operationally define what the opportunity or more likely the problem was. While we all know that a problem is just the flip side of an opportunity, my early approaches more often favored a problem-solving approach. Maybe I’d throw in a Pareto analysis or, even an experimental design. Sometimes I’d invite a group of people to brainstorm and/or do a cause and effect analysis or nominal group technique, for example. Beyond that, I always tried to stay current with my discipline, my industry, and the organization to which I was reporting. Based on that awareness, I would develop a plan for improvement that included a crude prediction of the magnitude of improvement and other consequences I was expecting, even as I knew the prediction might be wrong. As we all know, it is difficult to make predictions without analytic knowledge of the system that is being focused on. I learned the importance of prediction as part of Plan from Bill Scherkenbach (The Deming Route to Quality and Productivity. Rockville, MD: Mercury Press. 1991), even though Dr. Deming had been writing and talking about it for years.

While I still do all those activities, more recently, I define problems and opportunities rather than have them given to me by a boss or a client. I think that comes from listening to sources beyond the ones identified in the previous paragraph. I use the Elephant and the Blind Men story in my Managerial Ethics course to help remind my students and me that there are many perspectives to any complex situation and the more viewpoints we can secure, the more accurate will be our perception of the situation. By actively seeking out perspectives that do not naturally come my way, I see problems and opportunities that previously didn’t cross my path. I also spend a lot more time listening to my inner voice even though I don’t exactly know where that comes from. Some people call it meditation, some people call it mindfulness, and some people call it prayer. I just call it trying to be quiet and to keep my monkey mind at bay for, at least, a little while. Listening to that inner voice helps me see new problems and opportunities, it helps me choose what to work on, it helps me frame the opportunity, and it even leads me toward what I can do to give myself or others joy in my response to the opportunity.

Do

In the Do step, I have always tried to carry out the Plan. Over time, my appreciation for a system and knowledge that systems are embedded in other systems has grown. As a result, I am more aware of the effects of my actions on systems that are connected to the system I am focused on. I am also more aware that unintended consequences, both positive and negative, can occur within the system as a result of my actions. That broadened awareness not only enhances the quality of the Study and Act steps, but it also helps me make mid-term corrections during the Do step itself.

Study

When I first began using PDSA, I focused my study almost entirely on the quantitative outcome for which I was looking. I also tried to record other causes that might be affecting the result of my improvement process. However, I sometimes forgot to do that.

Over time, I began to become more disciplined about not only recording data about causes that had not been part of my original plan but also unintended consequences within the system I was studying. As time went on, I became more and more sensitive to what was going on in related systems. I began trying to look at all that as a family of indicators.

Act

At its essence, the Act step has always been the step at which we examine the cause-effect relationship we were testing. If we liked what we had accomplished, we usually standardized it so we could see further improvement or, at least, hold the gains. If we weren’t quite so successful, we would try another way to positively influence the results.

As the robustness of data studied has grown over the years, so has the robustness of the Act step. Here, we may decide to change our focus to an entirely different system as we embark on the next cycle of this ongoing PDSA wheel. We may focus on a system inside the original system, a system in which the original system is embedded, or another related system. The last change in how I address the Act step is that a most essential criterion for the choice of next steps is if it brings me joy. I trust this last consideration helps not only me but the larger world within which I reside.

As always, I treasure your comments and questions.