How Is Your Business Like a Banana?
Shigeo Shingo used this metaphor often. Find out why.
Improvement Insights Blog
Latest "Improvement Insights" Posts
Are You Wasting Time in Six Sigma?
Are you wasting time in Six Sigma on unnecessary steps?
Here’s how to kick start your improvement efforts.
Six Sigma Triage
People sometimes hesitate to tackle the Big Hairy Audacious Problems (BHAP) using Six Sigma. They start with something trivial. Trivial problems have limited data. The BHAP problems have better, more detailed data.
Tackle the Worst First!
More Six Sigma Project Mistakes
If you’re not getting the results you want from Six Sigma, there might be a problem in the development of your projects.
Here are some of the mistakes I see in Six Sigma projects.
Collapsing the Six Sigma Learning Curve
I believe we are teaching people things they don’t need to know to solve problems they don’t have to impress people they don’t like.
You don’t have to know everything about statistics to do Six Sigma projects. What you need to know adheres to the 4/50 Rule: 4% of the knowledge will deliver over 50% of the results.
And if you automate the formulas and decision trees using QI Macros, you can collapse the learning curve in such a way that “No Belts” can go from zero to hero in a matter of hours. Here’s how:
Show-Do-Know – The Secret to Accelerated Learning
Remember how you learned things when you were a kid? That’s not how anyone teaches Lean Six Sigma, but it could be.
Continue Reading "Show-Do-Know – The Secret to Accelerated Learning"
Six Sigma Green Belt Project Problem
One of our QI Macros users sent me a Greenbelt Project to review. The team did a great job of using the tools and connecting the dots. There was only one small problem…
Statistics are Simple
People have been trying to make statistics simple and easy to understand for decades.
But statistics aren’t simple. Maybe we should change how we teach them?
Top Down Change Doesn’t Work
Everyone seems to think that top down, leadership-driven is the only way to implement Lean Six Sigma. It’s not.
50 years of research proves that it fails half the time. Yep, 50% failure rate. That’s less than 1 sigma.
This type of failure is so common that it even has a name: The Stalinist Paradox.
Signal versus Noise
“Our evolutionary instincts sometimes lead us to see patterns when there are none there. People have been doing this all the time – finding patterns in random noise.” – Tomaso Poggio
People just need a way to separate the Signal from the Noise.
Here are some insights from the book by Nate Silver.
