Quality is a Journey to Excellence is a 2 day management seminar that Bill Hunter (my father) recorded in 1985 in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The embedded clip shows the fourth section of a the seminar on using data to improve.
meetings can go very smoothly and directly to solutions and get a lot of things done if somebody just brings the data. And if there is no data the only basis on which you can have a discussion is everybody’s opinions and prejudges and ideas and theories and hypothesis and hunches and all that. And they may be very valuable and some people may have very good ones but it is very difficult to convince other people your hunch is better than theirs or your opinion is better than someone else’s. Who tends to win tends to be the people with the higher rank or people who shout the loudest or things like that.
It is just incredible what can happen is someone brings some data and says look are biggest problem is not that and is not that and and its not this one either that we all thought was really the big one but its this one.
These links provide more details on ideas he discussed in the seminar:
- If you don’t use data then decisions often are just made based on the opinion of the highest ranked person in the room
- 94% Belongs to the System
- Create a System That Lets People Take Pride in Their Work
- Peter Scholtes on Teams and Viewing the Organization as a System
- Leadership While Viewing the Organization as a System
- Data Can’t Lie – people can be mislead if they misunderstand the data (including if someone intentionally seeks to mislead them)
- If Japan Can, Why Cant We?
The way most statistics course are taught is just terrible, its awful; its not that kind of statistics that I am talking about.
What is statistics? Statistics is how you learn from data…
There are two parts of statistics, one is how you collect the data and the other has to do with how you analyze the data. How you do those two things efficiently.
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some of the most powerful tools are very very simple.
In an organization that believes everyone’s brain matters and in order to continually improve we need to create an organization where we benefit from everyone’s effort we need to have everyone understanding data and how to measure the success of our efforts. This idea isn’t complicated. Creating an organization that actually does this is complicated. Making that a reality is what many of the posts on this blog are about. To learn more you could start with posts about data, respect for people and the organization as a system (and also what I think are some of the best posts on our blog).
