Improvement Insights Blog
Deming on When Training Will Help and When It Won’t
Deming described the conditions where a worker can benefit from training and when not. It has to do with the stability of their performance. I recently did a blog about his approach to using control charts to determine stability of worker performance.
“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software].
“Again, I was re-reading Deming’s “Out Of The Crisis” and he made a very interesting statement in here about personal performance. He actually used an example of amateur golfers versus pro golfers.
“He said if your performance is out of control like an amateur golfer, training will help. But if you’re somebody like a pro, training will not help, right? So if someone’s performance is in process control, sending them into more training is not going to make things better. We have to work on the system, not the person. We might want to reduce defects or increase viscosity or whatever the heck it is, but more training is not going to help. If somebody suddenly has an out of control spike, well yeah… you know, maybe then we should jump in and give them a little coaching, a little help around that. Does this make sense? Right? Training won’t help if your performance is already in statistical process control.
“So that’s my Improvement Insight for this week: Figure out when to do training and coaching and when not to. Let’s go out and improve something this week.”
