Improvement Insights Blog
Learn To Use Google To Look Stuff Up
The answer to almost any question about Lean Six Sigma methods and tools can be found on the internet. When you learn how to use Google or Bing search, you can cut the time to do almost anything. Here’s why:
“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma For Hospitals” and QI Macros [software].
“One of the things I think everybody should do is learn how to use Google to look stuff up. It may take you a little time to start to learn how to string words and phrases together; if you just start typing in your menu bar, Google will start feeding you things that you might want to choose that are things other people have already asked for, so you don’t have to know everything to do anything anymore, right? You can just start typing in.
“Maybe you want to know something about t tests; well, if you type in “t tests” you’re going to get a bunch of things you can go look about. If you’re in Quality Improvement you may have gotten trained a long time ago, but you may not remember all that crap they taught you in that class. Hey, go out and get a refresher. There might be a video on YouTube or there might be something written that you understand.
“One of the things I’ve learned is very often one author will speak to you better than another author. Some people are just too statistical in the way they talk about stuff, and other people it’s very clear and simple what they’re saying. Go find a resource out there that answers whatever question you have. I’ve learned all kinds of things about coding for the QI Macros online; without online stuff, all of those things that I’ve learned would have been very difficult. It’s not difficult anymore.
“I use that throughout my life. I learn how to look stuff up, and then guess what? That simplifies and shortcuts my path to success.
“One of the strangest things that happened to me is I was talking to the board and they were trying to decide how to add a recreation room to our condo. They [thought] “We need this giant such and such.” I Googled “recreation rooms for hotels” and I found something by Marriott that talked about how big their rooms were, given the size of hotel that they were building. They had a scale for how big to do that, and so I presented that to the board the board stopped going crazy and thinking they were blustering and whatever. I had some data, and so we sized the thing appropriate to what other people were already doing. I’ve done that in Quality: “Let’s look stuff up, maybe somebody else is already doing something you want to know how to do. It’s already been done before. Let’s go find it.” A little bit of Google will save you a lot of time.
“That’s my Improvement Insight for this week: Learn to Google. Let’s make a hassle-free America; hassle-free healthcare. Let’s go out and improve something this week.”
