{"id":4334,"date":"2021-05-18T01:00:05","date_gmt":"2021-05-18T07:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/?p=4334"},"modified":"2021-08-09T12:56:34","modified_gmt":"2021-08-09T18:56:34","slug":"go-upstream-for-quality-improvement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/go-upstream-for-quality-improvement\/","title":{"rendered":"Go Upstream for Quality Improvement"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>If you think your role in Quality Improvement is merely to prevent special cause variation, maybe it&#8217;s time to go &#8220;Upstream&#8221; with your thinking.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/544718333?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;Hi, this is Jay Arthur. I&#8217;m here in Ka&#8217;anapali in Maui and having a little vacation time.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;I just finished reading <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Upstream-Quest-Problems-Before-Happen\/dp\/1982134720\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Dan Heath\u2019s new book \u201cUpstream,\u201d<\/a> and for those of you in Quality Improvement you would see the pattern in here instantly as just continuous improvement: get some data, figure out how to fix things and then fix them. He&#8217;s tackling bigger things like\u2026 \u201cHow do we reduce murders of abused women?\u201d or \u201cHow do we reduce dropout rates in schools?\u201d So he&#8217;s showing a little bit bigger problem but it&#8217;s the same game we&#8217;re in, which is get some data, figure out what&#8217;s going on. I think with the abused women they looked at 200 cases\u2026<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;I wrote a thing called <a href=\"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/pdf\/dirty30.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u201cThe Dirty 30 Process for Six Sigma Software.\u201d<\/a> It&#8217;s the same thing: you take a handful of the worst cases, and then you go figure out what the patterns are and then you figure out how to mistake-proof it, which is what they were doing and it reduced homicides against abused women. I think if you read this book you&#8217;ll see that it&#8217;s there, but he calls it \u201cupstream.\u201d<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;Well, what&#8217;s he saying? You just can&#8217;t keep fixing stuff when it breaks. You can&#8217;t wait for a woman to be murdered before you decide to do something, right? You have to go upstream and figure out how to prevent that. Too often I see all kinds of people getting hung up thinking they&#8217;re doing Quality Improvement because they&#8217;re just doing\u2026 all they&#8217;re doing is fixing special causes. So consequently, that&#8217;s the kind of thing that I think we want to prevent, so go upstream.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m Jay Arthur. Let&#8217;s go out and improve something this week.&#8221;<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you think your role in Quality Improvement is merely to prevent special cause variation, maybe it&rsquo;s time to go &ldquo;Upstream&rdquo; with your thinking. &#65279; &ldquo;Hi, this is Jay Arthur. I&rsquo;m here in Ka&rsquo;anapali in Maui and having a little vacation time. &ldquo;I just finished reading Dan Heath&rsquo;s new book &ldquo;Upstream,&rdquo; and for those of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":4441,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[290],"tags":[140],"class_list":["post-4334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-improvement-insights","tag-quality-improvement"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4334","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=4334"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4334\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5233,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4334\/revisions\/5233"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}