Improvement Insights Blog

Do games work for Lean Six Sigma training? In my experience, they do not. Here’s why:

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“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software].

“Have you ever been in a training where they try and use fun games to try and teach you Quality Improvement? You know, I’ve been in all kinds of things where they’re trying to use something to teach you something, but it has nothing to do with my job or my business. And unfortunately, I found “Oh, that’s interesting. That’s fun. And how do I translate this the real world?” I don’t know, maybe other people don’t. Some people responded to that kind of training, but not me. I want to know how I’m going to use it in my real world.

“So, I’m going to encourage you that if you want to do this right, you want to use my Agile Lean Six Sigma Trainer Training to teach people how to use the tools and apply it to their data. Their data, not some made-up data, not some imaginary game, not some catapult thing to teach DOE… their data. When you do that, they are going to learn so much more deeply and so much more fully. Games teach you surface level knowledge, but you need that depth to really kind of get it in the marrow of your bones.

“So, that’s my Improvement Insight. Let’s go out and improve something this week. Like how we train people.”