{"id":4164,"date":"2021-05-04T01:00:40","date_gmt":"2021-05-04T07:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/?p=4164"},"modified":"2021-08-09T12:55:23","modified_gmt":"2021-08-09T18:55:23","slug":"use-numbers-not-percentages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/use-numbers-not-percentages\/","title":{"rendered":"Use Numbers Not Percentages"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>Ever noticed that when you describe something as a percentage people seem to draw a blank? They may nod, but not understand. Here&#8217;s why:<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/509884570?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\">\ufeff<\/span><\/iframe><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m Jay Arthur, author of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Lean-Six-Sigma-Demystified-Second\/dp\/0071749098\/\">\u201cLean Six Sigma Demystified\u201d<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/trial\/30-day\/\">QI Macros<\/a> [software].<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;I want to alert you to something that I discovered when I saw my friend, Dr. Jack ReVelle, speak. Now, if you know anything about control charts, you know that if you have an upper and lower control limit, well, 99.7% of all points should fit between those two things. And I saw Jack talk about this and I realized that nobody can make a picture of a percentage. 99.7%&#8230; What the heck does that look like? But Jack said, &#8220;What that means is that three points out of a thousand can normally be outside of the control limits in a natural state.&#8221;<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;So, if you see it within 20 or 30 points, it might be an out of control condition and you should investigate. Three points out of a thousand, people can make a picture of that. All right?<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;So, that comes into other things like Pareto&#8217;s rule: 20% of what you&#8217;re doing is producing 80% of the waste, rework, and lost profits. Well, those are a little bit easier numbers, but still a little hard to understand. And I narrowed that down because within the Pareto, 4% of what you&#8217;re doing produces over half the mistakes, errors, waste, and rework, but people still don&#8217;t know what 4% is. Right? So I said, well, that&#8217;s four steps out of a hundred or one step out of 25. Right? So it&#8217;s one step out of every 25 that is causing over half your waste, rework, lost profit, and whatever.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;Now, does this start to give you some ideas? If you&#8217;re going to talk about percentages, which no one can make a picture of, can you convert it into a number? Right? Three points out of a thousand. Oh, I know what three points out of a thousand looks like. A little bit, big thing. Right? Does this make sense? And when you start to do that, people can understand it better, quicker, and that leads you into a situation where learning becomes super fast.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;So, that&#8217;s my Improvement Insight for this week. Turn percentages into a number. And when you do that, people want to learn more quickly. Let&#8217;s create hassle-free healthcare, a hassle-free America. Let&#8217;s go out and improve something this week.&#8221;<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ever noticed that when you describe something as a percentage people seem to draw a blank? They may nod, but not understand. Here&rsquo;s why: &#65279; &ldquo;I&rsquo;m Jay Arthur, author of &ldquo;Lean Six Sigma Demystified&rdquo; and QI Macros [software]. &ldquo;I want to alert you to something that I discovered when I saw my friend, Dr. Jack [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":4466,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[290,162],"tags":[391,390,168],"class_list":["post-4164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-improvement-insights","category-statistics","tag-numbers","tag-percent","tag-qi-macros"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4164","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=4164"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4164\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4207,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4164\/revisions\/4207"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}