Improvement Insights Blog
Have You Got Addition Sickness?
When processes aren’t working, people try adding to the process rather than subtracting. Doesn’t work. Here’s why:
“I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software].
“I saw a phrase the other day that I liked, and I think you might get it. They called it “Addition Sickness”; Addition Sickness. What does that mean? Well, you end up adding more policies, procedures, rules, whatevers, workarounds, inspections… whatever it is. You know, Deming hated adding inspection; [he thought] that was stupid, right?
“But we tend to add things to a process to try and counteract whatever is going wrong. It’s Addition Sickness. Maybe we need to come up with some Subtraction Medicine: What can we subtract from here? What step can we remove? What delay can we take out so that we get the outcome we want?
“So if you find yourself wanting to add stuff to a process, think, “Hmm… I wonder how I could subtract that? I wonder how I could automate that?” Right?
“In the QI Macros, when I was trying to teach people how to do decision trees to choose a chart, they were all confused. [I thought,] “I can just create our Control Chart Wizard [that] will look at your data and pick the right chart for you.” That’s subtraction. I don’t have to teach you about decision trees; I let the software know decision trees, you just have to pick data. Subtraction.
“So that’s my Improvement Insight for this week. When you get that urge to add, think “I wonder what I could subtract? Let’s go out and improve something this week… by subtracting something.”
