{"id":2278,"date":"2019-08-20T01:00:11","date_gmt":"2019-08-20T07:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/?p=2278"},"modified":"2021-06-21T12:15:40","modified_gmt":"2021-06-21T18:15:40","slug":"sameness-or-difference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/sameness-or-difference\/","title":{"rendered":"Sameness or Difference?"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>How you look at things can make all the difference in the results you achieve in the world. Here&#8217;s why:<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/346698619?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0\" width=\"720\" height=\"405\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><span data-mce-type=\"bookmark\" style=\"display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;\" class=\"mce_SELRES_start\"><\/span><\/iframe><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p>&#8220;Hi, I&#8217;m Jay Arthur, author of \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Lean-Six-Sigma-Demystified-Second\/dp\/0071749098\">Lean Six Sigma Demystified<\/a>\u201d and the QI Macros [software].<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;I just got back from a whirlwind cruise of Scandinavia: Norway, Finland, Sweden, Copenhagen, Germany, St. Petersburg in Russia, Estonia\u2026 and one of the things that struck me about this is as you go around, how similar we all are. We all want to make a good living doing meaningful work, we want to raise successful children, we want to have our own home, all of these things we&#8217;re similar, right? It doesn&#8217;t matter if we speak different languages or have different alphabets, maybe our skin color\u2019s different, maybe we pray to different gods in different houses of worship, but we&#8217;re still praying, right?<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;So if you look at how we&#8217;re the same as opposed to how we&#8217;re different, I think that might really change the world. Now I think if you focus on this &#8211; how we&#8217;re similar &#8211; that can make life easy, and if you focus on how we&#8217;re different, that can make life hard because that creates boundaries. There was no greater image of that than what remains of the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Berlin_Wall\">Berlin Wall<\/a> in Berlin.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;There&#8217;s this little bit of art project that still lives out there in Berlin about where the wall was, how it was a dividing thing between countries: between communism and capitalism, and all this other stuff. I think if you look at that, there&#8217;s a way to start thinking about things as being similar.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;Now many people will say to me, \u201cJay, well there&#8217;s these exceptions\u2026\u201d Well, yeah, there&#8217;s always going to be exceptions, but they don&#8217;t disprove the similarities, they don&#8217;t disprove the generalities, they don&#8217;t disprove all of that. In fact, I think if there weren&#8217;t exceptions we&#8217;d be wondering what was going on. I see exceptions as a type of commonality; a similar thing. Almost everything has exceptions but they don&#8217;t disprove the rule.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;I also see this in Lean and Six Sigma. To a lot of people if I say Six Sigma, they&#8217;ll say, \u201cWell, that&#8217;s just for manufacturing, isn&#8217;t it?\u201d No. My short answer is no; why is that? Because everybody everywhere is working on a process. There&#8217;s people, they&#8217;re working on a process to deliver a product or service; that&#8217;s all the same. Now the thing going through the process might be different &#8211; it might be patients, it might be pistons, it might be software, it might be soft goods\u2026 it&#8217;s the thing going through the process that&#8217;s different but the processes are the same. If you look at any company they&#8217;ll have marketing, sales, purchasing, procurement, payments, billing, invoicing, collections\u2026 they&#8217;re all doing the same thing. Even my little software company does the same thing that General Mills does, they just do it on a big scale, all right? So the processes are the same, the thing going through the process is different.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;People often ask me, \u201cJay, how can you work with healthcare when you were in telephony?\u201d Pretty easy, right? They just have patients going through the processes, and I see the processes are the same, the patient is the difference.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;When you start to think about how can we focus on the similarities rather than differences, I think that can make life a lot easier for all of us, create more connection, right? Because even if our languages are different we&#8217;re still talking &#8211; we&#8217;re still communicating. We may not understand each other, but we can figure out how to understand each other.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;Anyway, that&#8217;s my Improvement Insight for this week. Let&#8217;s create a hassle-free America, a hassle-free world that&#8217;s connected and likes each other. I think it&#8217;s entirely possible, but we\u2019ve got to want it. So let&#8217;s go out and improve something this week.&#8221;<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How you look at things can make all the difference in the results you achieve in the world. Here&rsquo;s why: &ldquo;Hi, I&rsquo;m Jay Arthur, author of &ldquo;Lean Six Sigma Demystified&rdquo; and the QI Macros [software]. &ldquo;I just got back from a whirlwind cruise of Scandinavia: Norway, Finland, Sweden, Copenhagen, Germany, St. Petersburg in Russia, Estonia&hellip; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":4809,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[290,3,7],"tags":[166,118,168,140,170],"class_list":["post-2278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-improvement-insights","category-lean","category-six-sigma","tag-lean","tag-lean-six-sigma","tag-qi-macros","tag-quality-improvement","tag-six-sigma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2278"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2278\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3691,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2278\/revisions\/3691"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}