Improvement Insights Blog

People have to know the WHY in order to learn something more effectively.

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

“I was working on [building] a tool called Multinomial Logistic Regression (if that doesn’t choke you up I don’t know what would), but it’s a way of starting to forecast things; people asked for it so I built it. I was telling my wife about this and she said, “Oh, and you tell me you’re not a statistician!” I say, “No I’m not, I’m a coder.” Right? I can code things all right, but I don’t… I don’t grasp it like everybody thinks one might possibly do it. I envy people who can look at statistical equations and know exactly what’s going on. I’m not that guy, right? All of my learning about all of this has been very hard won… very hard won. It is not easy for me.

“Now, over time I’ve slowly acquired an understanding, and I discovered that one of the things that’s always been important to me is [the answer to the question] “WHY would you want to do this?” Most of the documentation on multinomial logistic regression talked about what to do and how to do it and how to use certain kind of tools to make it happen… blah blah blah… but nobody told me WHY you’d want to do it.

“I was actually looking around on some other things and eventually discovered that it’s designed to help you forecast what will happen. It’s more like… “In the past we’ve had certain people buy certain things, and they’re of a certain age group and a certain income group and they live in a certain area…” right? Demographics about that person. So we can start to tell who might be more likely to buy than other groups, right? One ZIP code may not be the same as a different ZIP code, and so we could focus on the one ZIP code that really makes it happen. That’s the WHY. I thought, “Well, how come I looked all over the Internet and looked at all of the examples and nobody ever told me WHY?” I’m a big “WHY” guy; I have to know WHY we want to do something, and then I can say, “Okay, I want to bother to learn it” and so on.

“I think that’s true with Quality Improvement: people have to know WHY. Will it help you get more customers? Yes. Will it help you grow your market share? Yes. Will it help you more employ more people? Yeah. Will it help you change the world? Yes. Right? They have to know the WHY.

“So anyway, that’s my Improvement Insight for this week: some things are hard to learn. Figure out the WHY and then go learn them. Let’s create a hassle-free America; hassle-free healthcare.

Let’s go out and improve something this week.”