Improvement Insights Blog
5S Your Environment and Not Just Your Work Area
The steps of 5S include things that we can do in our everyday lives with our workplaces, our house, our neighborhood. When you do that, I think it makes the world a better place for everyone.
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“Well hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software].
“Many, many years ago, a friend of mine and I went to Hong Kong because I’d read the book “Tai-Pan,” and I really wanted to see Hong Kong back before it became part of China. It was about ‘95, I think, 30 years ago. Anyway, so we went there, and I had a vision in my head that it was more the 1800s, but I walked around in Hong Kong, and everything was spic and span. The streets were clean.
“And I discovered that to everybody there, it’s verboten to mess with it, right? Just like in Texas, they don’t mess with Texas, throwing stuff from your car. No, the same sort of thing, right? And if there was something laying on the ground… you’d see somebody just pick it up and put it in a trash can.
“So, I would like you to think about that as a way to go about life because whenever I’m out wandering around… I was walking into work the other day and there was a little bag for potato chips. I just picked it up, put it in the trash by the door when I walked in. And I‘ve picked up bottles and all kinds of crud I keep finding as we go through here, right? But what are we doing? Let’s police that area. It’s part of the 5S process, right? Put stuff away. Trash it and, you know, don’t leave a mess. And if everybody did that, I think we’d have much cleaner cities, much cleaner workplaces and whatever.
“I do the same thing at the office. The other day, we had a shipping tube that we’d been using to go to conferences and we weren’t using it anymore and I took it to Goodwill. Get it out of the office. Get it out of the way, right? 5S: Sort, Straighten, Shine [Standardize and Sustain], right? All of these things are things that we can do in our everyday lives with our workplaces, our house, our neighborhood, and when you do that, I think it makes the world a better place for everyone.
“That’s my Improvement Insight for this week: 5S Your Environment. Let’s make the world a better place.”
