Improvement Insights Blog

You don’t really Learn Quality Improvement or Lean Six Sigma in a classroom. Here’s why:

“I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma for Hospitals” and QI Macros [software].

“You know, I’ve discovered that you don’t really learn Quality Improvement in a classroom, you learn it afterwards. It’s more like an apprenticeship where you go out and start to try stuff and figure things out. If there’s somebody around, you get a little help with that. When I started, there was nobody around to help me with that, so I kind of stumbled for a while but then I figured it out.

“This is one of those things where we go out and we learned stuff in the classroom. I had great training, and I got out and I was incapable of actually finding and figuring out the stuff I probably should have been able to figure out quickly. Eventually I did, and then I was like a holy terror… it was just crazy!

“So think of this as a learning process. You’re not going to come out of your training and be a superstar, but you can come out of your training and keep going. Don’t be one of those ‘one-and-done-ers’ who do one project and that’s it, right? Think of this as something you do all the time: at home, at work, wherever you are there’s opportunities to apply improvement to anything you do… a homeowners association, whatever it is.

“So that’s my Improvement Insight for this week. Let’s go out and improve something this week.”