Improvement Insights Blog
Simple It UP – Don’t Dumb It Down
People often accuse me of trying to take Six Sigma and dumb it down. No. I’m trying to Simple It UP. Here’s why:
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“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software].
People often accuse me of trying to ‘dumb down’ Six Sigma. I’m not; I’m trying to ‘simple it up.’ Huge difference. ‘Dumbing it down’ pretends that people are dumb. ‘Simpling it up’ means I’m trying to make it so that everyone can access it.
“In the QI Macros, we have the Control Chart Wizard which automates the selection of the right control chart so you don’t have to know how to select a control chart, which is one of the things I found people had a hard time learning. We also have the Stat Wizard which will do the same thing for statistics: it’ll figure out what to do with your data. Does it need an ANOVA or an f test or a t test or whatever? Then it’ll go figure all that out and present that information to you. I’m trying to simple it up.
“We also have a Chart Wizard, we have a Process Change Wizard that will detect process changes in your control chart and change the limits automatically; that’s not dumbing it down, that’s simpling it up so that everybody can do it. Then we have the Improvement Project Wizard that’ll take raw data and turn all that raw data into whole improvement projects with a click of a button. That used to take me hours and sometimes days to do that manually. I automated it, and now it’ll do that very quickly. So is that dumbing it down, or is that simpling it up so that everyone can get involved?
“Nobody… let me tell you, nobody wants Six Sigma. What they want are the results they think they’ll get from implementing Six Sigma. That’s it. That’s all they want, right? They don’t want all that other junk. They want results. They want improvements. They want a bottom line, defect reducing, delay reducing, deviation reducing, profit enhancing and productivity enhancing and patient safety [enhancing results]. They want the good stuff. They want the result of Six Sigma, not Six Sigma itself. Nobody wants that.
“So that’s my Improvement Insight: Simple it up. Let’s start to improve something this week.”
