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Deming's 14 Imperatives  represent Deming's unequivocal positions on a range of factors that will impact on 
    - the effectiveness of the enterprise (eg School) 
    - and people's abilities to be successful contributors 
    - people's well-being

1. Maintain a constancy of purpose

• be clear about what you want to achieve and are working towards
• build understanding of the purposes
• demonstrate the capacity of the School to achieve those purposes
• underpin action with sound well-articulated principles
• acquire or develop tools, models that make it easy for everyone to contribute to the achievement of the purposes
• ensure that all benefit from the purposes

2. Commit to the new philosophy 

• learn to articulate the philosophy, theory, values, assumptions ... that underpin one's intentions
• demonstrate a personal commitment to the things you ask of others
• demonstrate a commitment to those of whom one asks

3. Cease dependence on mass inspection 

• work to ensure that the processes are effective
• provide tools, sampling methods, 
• make assessment/appraisal collaborative and intrinsic

4. Stop doing business on the basis of cheapest; 

• reduce cost by reducing variation 
• calculate the total cost not just the initial cost
• understand the total operation and the costs & benefits of each part of the system

5. Improve systems continuously & forever 

• make the system explicit
• eliminate the unnecessary
• invest in prevention of failure
• identify and specify processes & apply PDSA
• identify constraints & apply the theory of constraints
• concede no ultimate upper limit

6. Provide training to acquire skills 

• make tasks expectations explicit and achieveable
• invest in the people, their capabilities and well-being
• know what people need more of (or less of) in order to do their work easier and well

7. Provide leadership: move everyone from

• roles to relationships
• rules to principles
• directives to dialogue
• control to agreement
• policy to understanding
• bossing to leadership

8. Drive out fear 

• assign major responsibility to the system (eg, 'The School is responsible for the education of the student')
• clarify that staff act on behalf of the system
• demonstrate system support for staff  
• build teams (to support each other and ensure mutual success)
• move from policy and control to reality and collaboration
• have fun and do well

9. Break down the barriers to cooperation

• make information freely available
• build teams
• focus on improvement before change
• make purposes explicit and methods known
• support informed responsible initiatives
• risk failure responsibly

10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations and arbitrary targets 

• focus on the intrinsic importance of what is being done
• encourage independent goal setting
• encourage independent self evaluation

11. Eliminate numerical quotas for the workforce (staff & students ...)

• focus on improvement not end points
• measure performance and make improvements

12. Remove barriers to pride in work 

• know about people's endeavours and achievements
• acknowledge achievements
• encourage people to know about each other's endeavours and achievements

13. Promote education and personal growth for everyone

• ensure that people have opportunities for personal development
• complement training with education
• encourage people to have rich lives with major interests outside the enterprise

14. Act to achieve the transformation 

• do all the above and
• learn what to change, 
• learn what to change to, and 
• learn how to achieve the change
• act on your learning