I have a purpose for all this math talk. If you don’t understand my reference, please read my last four newsletters (https://www.chalmersst.com/blog/). My clients hire us to improve processes. My role as an entrepreneur is to give them more than they ask for. That means I need to meet their true need. And their true need is for analytical thinkers to emerge within their staff. Let’s discuss the problem, and then I’ll share my thoughts on how we solve it.
Human language is loose and vague. Think of a time when you left a meeting believing everyone was aligned, in a direction, only to find a day or a week later that had moved in different directions and everyone was confused. This happens constantly in our large complex organizations. Why does this happen? Are people not paying attention? Do they not really care about the outcome of the project? I don’t think so. Bluntly speaking, don’t assign to malice what can be explained by confusion. Confusion is all around us, but it hides in the broad interpretation of words and in people’s tendency to show they understand when they really don’t.
Verbal language is vague. Written language is better, but it is still open to interpretation. Mathematical language is precise, and that precision helps us improve.
“The power of mathematics lies in extending language with precisely defined words.” – David Bessis
The logic of math helps us better define the relationships that we see and put greater meaning into our words. The quantification we create strengthens our logical reasoning and helps validate whether we are moving in the right direction. This does not always have to be done with data. Precise words provide us with logic as well. A strong 5 Whys analysis, using clean and simple words with clear operational definitions. , also reinforces our logic. If you are not familiar with operational definitions, look up the term. It also has a specific meaning. Math gives us precision, clarity, and shared definition. This is how we solve the problem of understanding and alignment. We slow down our language, we check for understanding, we refine definitions, and we validate the logical reasoning. And I emphasize “slow down”.
To close this gap in aligned understanding, we must chart a course toward precision, clarity, and shared definition. Here are some thoughts on how we get there.
First, I will restate the classic, slow down to go faster. In modern organization, we are obsessed with speed, often to our own detriment. Make more. Produce faster. Just make a decision. I fully support urgency, but not at the expense of clarity. Without clarity we end up in cycles of useless meetings and misdirection. Slowing down to avoid this is going faster.
Second, as CI practitioners and problem solvers, we must fully utilize the language of mathematics. We must get comfortable with this language and help others around us get comfortable with it. That is what this entire newsletter series seeks to do. When I am successful with this, I am addressing my client’s real problem which is improving the analytic thinking of their organizations. Getting comfortable with math means getting comfortable with measurement. It means thinking of ways to quantify the abstract realities of an operation. It means testing our quantification to ensure it is repeatable and reproducible. It means using the data that we collect through this process to compare, contrast, and visualize processes and the cause-and-effect relationships we seek to understand. And finally, it means imagining the impact of our proposed change and using the data to forecast or predict the result.
I tell Black Belts: I know you understand the cause-and-effect nature of a problem when you have the confidence to predict, with data, the impact of the solution you intend to pursue. That is the real power of Lean and Six Sigma.
Improving operations requires improving analytical thinking. This is what we seek to do when we teach Lean and Six Sigma. This produces better solutions with predictable results. Math can be daunting to many CI practitioners, especially those who come to CI without an engineering background. Don’t be intimidated! If you have kept up with my newsletters, you know that I, too, have struggled to improve my intuition with numbers. By keeping at it, I have improved my analytical skills to the point where I can help others do the same. And this is not just about modeling processes in a spreadsheet. It is about the precision of our language and the clarity of our meaning. This is the true need of most organizations.