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Experiment Your Way to Success

by Jamie Flinchbaugh on 04-24-12

My latest column for Industry Week, Lessons from the Road, titled Experiment Your Way to Success has been posted. Here is an excerpt:

 

The heart of most effective continuous improvement is experimentation. Experimentation is the mother of all learning methods. It drives learning throughout an organization based on what is real, not based on theory or opinion. Whether you use PDCA, DMAIC, 8D, A3s or any other method in the alphabet soup of continuous improvement, there is a backbone of experimentation whose spirit you can follow, or fail to.

You can read the entire post here.

Here are my previous Lessons from the Road columns:

Experiment Your Way to Success
How the mother of all learning methods can help your organization improve.
4/18/2012

Securing the Elusive Lean Buy-In
Take advantage of this four-step process to achieve buy-in for your lean efforts.
2/15/2012

Building Manager Standard Work
Standardization can help you free up time and use it more proactively.
11/16/2011

Going to the Gemba
Far from a stroll on the plant floor, a gemba represents a purposeful attempt to learn what is really going on.
9/14/2011

How to Train Without Training
When training dollars are scarce, there are still good ways to develop your workforce. Try these three strategies.
7/20/2011

Lessons From the Road: Sustaining Your 5S Efforts
5S too often is short-lived, but these six steps can help keep it running smoothly.
5/17/2011

Lessons From the Road: Surfacing Problems Daily
Advice for building a problem-solving culture.
3/16/2011

Comments

  • Viewing PDSA (or whatever improvement cycle you use) as an experiment is one of the important ways that highly effective organization differ from those that don’t see what the big deal with PDSA is. The curiosity that drives experimentation is a powerful ally.

    http://management.curiouscatblog.net/2012/03/06/keys-to-the-effective-use-of-the-pdsa-improvement-cycle/

    http://management.curiouscatblog.net/2009/11/16/highlights-from-recent-george-box-speech/

    I think design of experiments (DoE) is incredibly powerful. To be most effective it requires some rigor. Often PDSA’s are done in a fairly lose experimentation. That is often fine. If you are going to actually have rigor in your experiment then I think DoE often will be the best way to go. But if you are just doing some quick test to see that yes changing x does reduce cycle time by 15% and doesn’t have some unintended consequence we didn’t see then just doing a quick one factor experiment can be fine.

    My father did a bunch of work with DoE and I learned about it as a kid and have loved it since then. To learn more, see: curiouscat.com/management/doe.cfm

    John Huner May 7, 2012 at 4:15 am
  • Viewing PDSA (or whatever improvement cycle you use) as an experiment is one of the important ways that highly effective organization differ from those that don’t see what the big deal with PDSA is. The curiosity that drives experimentation is a powerful ally.

    http://management.curiouscatblog.net/2012/03/06/keys-to-the-effective-use-of-the-pdsa-improvement-cycle/

    http://management.curiouscatblog.net/2009/11/16/highlights-from-recent-george-box-speech/

    I think design of experiments (DoE) is incredibly powerful. To be most effective it requires some rigor. Often PDSA’s are done in a fairly lose experimentation. That is often fine. If you are going to actually have rigor in your experiment then I think DoE often will be the best way to go. But if you are just doing some quick test to see that yes changing x does reduce cycle time by 15% and doesn’t have some unintended consequence we didn’t see then just doing a quick one factor experiment can be fine.

    My father did a bunch of work with DoE and I learned about it as a kid and have loved it since then. To learn more, see: curiouscat.com/management/doe.cfm

    John Huner May 7, 2012 at 4:15 am
  • Viewing PDSA (or whatever improvement cycle you use) as an experiment is one of the important ways that highly effective organization differ from those that don’t see what the big deal with PDSA is. The curiosity that drives experimentation is a powerful ally.

    http://management.curiouscatblog.net/2012/03/06/keys-to-the-effective-use-of-the-pdsa-improvement-cycle/

    http://management.curiouscatblog.net/2009/11/16/highlights-from-recent-george-box-speech/

    I think design of experiments (DoE) is incredibly powerful. To be most effective it requires some rigor. Often PDSA’s are done in a fairly lose experimentation. That is often fine. If you are going to actually have rigor in your experiment then I think DoE often will be the best way to go. But if you are just doing some quick test to see that yes changing x does reduce cycle time by 15% and doesn’t have some unintended consequence we didn’t see then just doing a quick one factor experiment can be fine.

    My father did a bunch of work with DoE and I learned about it as a kid and have loved it since then. To learn more, see: curiouscat.com/management/doe.cfm

    John Huner May 7, 2012 at 4:15 am
  • Thanks for sharing John. I think curiosity is essential. Without it, experimentation is just validation. But when it’s used to explore and learn it is so much more powerful.

    DoE is very powerful, when the conditions are right, and the skill applied is true.

    Jamie Flinchbaugh May 7, 2012 at 6:52 pm