Improvement Insights Blog
What Kind of Statistical Horse Are You?
Shunryū Suzuki said there are four kinds of horses: excellent, good, poor and bad horses. When it comes to statistics, the bad horse may be the best horse. Here’s why:
“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software].
“Shunryū Suzuki said there are four kinds of horses: Excellent ones, good ones, poor ones and bad ones. Now everybody wants to be the excellent horse or the good horse, but nobody wants to be the dead-last, bad horse. He suggests that the bad horse has to work extra hard to learn how to run, to learn how to do things, right? And that’s me and statistics.
“I am the bad horse when it comes to statistics. But he said through practice, the bad horse becomes the lead horse because they get it in the marrow of their bones… marrow of their bones. I always admire people who just, you know… statistics is like second nature to them. It is not to me, and it may not be to you.
“Don’t feel bad about being a poor horse or a bad horse when it comes to statistics, right? You don’t need to know everything. QI Macros will handle a lot of the stuff for statistical process control and so on. There’s some simple things to understand about statistics, P values and stuff like that, but you don’t need to know everything to be good at it. You [can] gain a little bit and then you gain a little bit more and eventually you get it in the marrow of your bones.
“That’s my Improvement Insight for this week: Don’t feel bad about not knowing everything there is to know about everything. Let’s go out and improve something this week.”
