Improvement Insights Blog

Are you skipping Six Sigma stones across the surface of your business or are you finding people who take to it like a duck to water. People who can dive beneath the surface to find the invisible low-hanging fruit?

“Have you ever skipped a rock across a lake? Maybe the first time you threw it out there it just went “sploosh.” Then you figured out that flatter rocks skip better, so you started throwing them out and they’d go “skip-skip-sploosh,” or maybe get three or four or five “skip-skips” and “sploosh.”

“Then a duck came flying in, put out its landing gear and just kind of eased into the water. Then it started drilling down, getting down into the growth underneath there to feed on all the stuff that’s in there.

“I think this is a lot like Six Sigma. We train these Black Belts and Green Belts and some of them go out and “sploosh”; they do one project. Some of them “sploosh-sploosh”; they do two projects, or “skip-skip-skip-sploosh”; they do a handful of projects and then they’re done.

“Then there’s some people who take to this stuff like a duck to water, like I did, and go out and start doing improvement projects, and they start digging under the surface of what looks like the problem and getting down to the deep stuff, right? Getting down under the water to find out where all the cool stuff is that will save tons of money. With the QI Macros Data Mining Wizard you can start to do that deep dive that will get you to the [root of] things.

“I do believe that if we train people in one or two days in a Yellow Belt class, give them the QI Macros to help them drill down, we can very quickly determine who’s a “sploosher” and who’s going to take to it like a duck to water and start doing endless improvements that’ll do fabulous things for the organization and for customers. So are you going to be a rock skipper or are you going to be somebody who takes to it like a duck to water?

“That’s my Improvement Insight for this week. Let’s go out and improve something.”