{"id":8430,"date":"2026-09-22T01:00:34","date_gmt":"2026-09-22T07:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/?p=8430"},"modified":"2026-08-27T16:20:44","modified_gmt":"2026-08-27T22:20:44","slug":"harder-is-easier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/harder-is-easier\/","title":{"rendered":"Harder is Easier"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">People seem to think Six Sigma and SPC are hard. They aren&#8217;t anymore. That&#8217;s why harder is easier.<\/p>\r\n<p><em>Download my free ebook, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/pdf\/Agile-Process-Innovation.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Agile Process Innovation &#8211; Hacking Lean Six Sigma for Results<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/1207429552?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 class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&#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 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/demo\/\">QI Macros [software]<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;I was reading Eric Ries\u2019 new book \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.simonandschuster.com\/books\/Incorruptible\/Eric-Ries\/9798893311860\">Incorruptible<\/a>,\u201d and in there he has this concept: He says \u2018Harder is easier.\u2019 What? How can harder be easier?<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;Well, I think you&#8217;ve all had that experience where it may have taken you a little bit longer to learn how to do things the right way, and then that made it easier forever, right? Learning how to tie your shoe was hard to start, and now it&#8217;s pretty easy.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;I think a lot of people think that Six Sigma and Statistical Process Control are hard, and &#8220;I don&#8217;t want to spend all the time to learn it.&#8221; Well, guess what? If you do, the world gets easier. It may seem hard, but it makes life easier.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;QI Macros automates all those things like control charts and control chart rules and statistics, and we just make that so simple. Right? All the things that used to be hard aren&#8217;t hard anymore. I think you&#8217;ve noticed that maybe with other things that you&#8217;ve used. You know, your old flip phone and how hard it was to do things and now you just talk into to your smartphone and it transcribes what you&#8217;re doing. Harder is easier, especially if harder&#8217;s not hard anymore.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;All right, so this is a thought that you might want to take forward. Now, once you start using control charts to monitor all your business\u2019 KPIs\u2026 every company I&#8217;ve talked to, when they implemented that, they had to train their leadership team about what it was telling them. Then the leadership team said, &#8220;Oh, it&#8217;s so much easier to manage the business because we know what&#8217;s working well and what&#8217;s going out of control and we got to go attend to it.\u201d We only spend energy where it needs to be spent and then we can say, &#8220;Well, we want to move this bar down and that bar up.&#8221; And so, we can aim our improvement projects at the things that really need to be improved.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;Harder is easier, especially if harder&#8217;s not hard anymore.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;So, that&#8217;s my Improvement Insight. Harder is easier, especially if it&#8217;s not hard anymore.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;Let&#8217;s go out and improve something this week.&#8221;<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>People seem to think Six Sigma and SPC are hard. They aren&rsquo;t anymore. That&rsquo;s why harder is easier. Download my free ebook, Agile Process Innovation &ndash; Hacking Lean Six Sigma for Results. &#65279; &ldquo;Hi, I&rsquo;m Jay Arthur, author of &ldquo;Lean Six Sigma Demystified&rdquo; and QI Macros [software]. &ldquo;I was reading Eric Ries&rsquo; new book &ldquo;Incorruptible,&rdquo; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":8511,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[290],"tags":[629,170,91],"class_list":["post-8430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-improvement-insights","tag-qimacros","tag-six-sigma","tag-spc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8430","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=8430"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8430\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8526,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8430\/revisions\/8526"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}