Improvement Insights Blog

After WWII, Deming had to turn to Japan to spread the gospel of quality. I often feel empathy and sympathy for his struggles to bring quality improvement to the world.

Download my free ebook, Agile Process Innovation-Hacking Lean Six Sigma for Results.

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

“I have sympathy for W. Edwards Deming. He learned Quality Improvement at Western Electric with Shewhart back in the ‘20s and ‘30s. And then all of those tools were used in World War II. But after World War II, he was sort of a pariah. He had to go to Japan and help their car industry come alive and build a level of quality. And then eventually, American auto manufacturers said, “There’s something going on over there… I don’t know what, but I think we better find out.” And so Deming was reintroduced.

“Now, I saw Deming at a four-day seminar back in about 1990. And he was… stern and, you know, “14 principles,” right? I understand he was probably so annoyed that everybody doesn’t want to get on board with things that are probably pretty easy to implement and save a lot of time and energy.

“And I’ve felt the same way, right? It’s because of [creating] QI Macros and things that I’ve done and books that I’ve written and everything else. You know, most of the time I feel like I’m in a little isolated bubble and I can’t tell what’s going on. Then every once in a while, I go to a conference and somebody comes up… I was at one health care conference and an emergency department director came up to me and he said, “You saved my life,” and then he ran off. I was [thinking,] “Hey, wait!” Somehow, putting in QI Macros and measuring things made life easier for him as an ED director.

“I had another guy come up to me at a conference from Norway. He took one of my books on Agile Process Innovation and looked at it. He was very sternly looking at it, but he read it on the way back on the plane and he came the next year to the conference. He walked up to me. He said “I saw your idea about Agile Process Innovation and I scoffed. I scoffed,” he says, “and then I read the book on the way back on the plane and I tried it.” Then he smiled and he said, “It works.” These are the kinds of things that reinforce the magic of what we’re trying to do.

“Then the guy who came up to me at the conference this year and said, “I took your [free Lean Six Sigma] Yellow Belt training. I used QI Macros to help my company save five million dollars.” Other women come up to me at these conferences, they [tell me], “I use QI Macros every day.” I thought, “I don’t even use it every day! How can you possibly use it every day?” But they do.

“So I feel a level of empathy or sympathy for Deming, struggling all these years to get people to embrace Quality Improvement. Maybe if we just reach out and start to teach other people, we can get more and more people involved, make it easier and easier. That’s what I’m trying to do with QI Macros, because it’s the only software that automates all kinds of things like choosing the right control chart or statistic, [and] building entire improvement projects from raw data. Nobody else does that. I’m trying to automate the hard parts so we can get on with the good part, which is improvement… that’s all anybody cares about anyway.

“So that’s my Improvement Insight for this week. The next time somebody does something remarkable, let them know, all right? Or if you’re using QI Macros, write an article. Get it published; send me a copy. Or if you’re doing an improvement poster for a conference, maybe you need help. Send it to us. We can help you with that. Right? And make a better poster. Because I think most of the posters that are out there are 89% line and bar charts: The dumb and dumber of charts. But if you start to show your work, (Seth Godin always says this: “Show your work,”) then you can get more people engaged and moving. Then maybe I won’t have to have so much sympathy for all the people around me who are trying to lead and guide these improvement efforts.

“That’s my Improvement Insight for this week. Let’s go out and improve something. Let’s make the world a better place.”