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07/10/2012 12:31 PM
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Sam
Thank you and for your good definition of IE.
Ron
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07/10/2012 04:30 PM
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Sorry Ron...
Meant to start that by saying:
Sam,
and then the rest of that is about what I meant to say...
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07/11/2012 11:01 AM
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Kris, I don't believe anyone would disagree with you about the necessity of using common sense in anything you do, except today, people are not calling it common sense as much as they are calling it critical thinking. Criticl thinking is currently being taught at both grade school and college levels. Academicians have determined that the information students obtain from text books, and from their work place, could be significantly enhanced if they knew how to evaluate and analyze it. Some people relate the application of the critical thinking process to the Socratic method.
Here's one definition of critical thinking in case you're not familiar with it:
Critical Thinking
The rigorous use of information, observation, experience, and logical reasoning
to evaluate and analyze any situation needing clarification or resolution
for the purpose of guiding one's beliefs, decisions, and actions.
Note that it starts with observations, experiences, and logical reasoning and combines them with an ability to evaluate and analyze everything to then arrive at substantiated conclusions. It's almost like being a Sherlock Holmes.
I would think critical thinking and Industrial Engineering go hand-in-hand in that you need both to be effective in your job. Industrial engineers definitely need to be critical thinkers.
Sam Tomas
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07/11/2012 04:28 PM
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Critical Thinking is not the same as Common Sense.
I'll throw another definition from wikipedia out there:
Common sense is defined by Merriam-Webster as, "sound and prudent judgment based on a simple perception of the situation or facts." Thus, "common sense" (in this view) equates to the knowledge and experience which most people already have, or which the person using the term believes that they do or should have.
Critical thinking is something you do. Common sense is something you possess.
Common sense is NOT common to everyone. It is what one person believes should be sensical to other people they are common with. What is common sense to a group of brain surgeons is not common sense to me.
When Fujio Cho says that lean is common sense I think he believes that everyone he is talking to or about should have the knowledge and experience associated with it. In my personal learning about lean, I agree with him. Everything about lean just makes sense. It makes sense to me as someone who has worked on the floor, studied manufacturing, made changes, and improved processes. I think that anyone who has taken a step back with a customer focus and thought about the right way to run a business is going to consider everything about lean to be common sense.
There's the rub. Many, many people have spent years working in silo'd organizations with totalatarian leaders who managed through numbers. They have spent years Critically Thinking about how they can "beat" the numbers. What has become common sense to them as a whole, is not good for the business. To Fujio Cho, these people have no common sense (or at least they don't ever use common sense). In reality what is common to them is that if you don't meet your production numbers (regardless of the inventory), you will be out of a job. They know this and they believe everyone like them should have the same knowledge. This immense roadblock, by the way, is why consultants who have worked for Toyota or a well established lean company their entire life might not be the best people to talk to when trying to understand lean implementation. They have never had to overcome unaligned common sense.
So critical thinking doesn't replace common sense. Critical thinking over time leads to what a group thinks of as common sense. That common sense may or may not be useful to you.
Now let me flip this and pull it back to the orginal question:
1) What is it that a six sigma black belt thinks critically about over time? Answer: Statistical Analysis and Complex Problem Solving.
2) What is it that an associate running a process thinks critically about over time? Answer: The process they are running and the problems associated with that particular process.
Of the two, who's common sense is more important to solve a problem? What is common to one will not be common to the other, and vice versa.
Lean says respect and build trust in your people. When there is a problem causing, create autonomous and visual systems that will get teams at the lowest level in the organization working on solving that problem (regardless if it is quality defect generation, safety, delivery, or efficiency). Give them the resources to solve their own problems while also developing them to solve more complex problems. If the resources they need to solve a problem include the necessity to do high level statistical analysis, then give them that support/resource.
Six Sigma says to respect and build trust in your data. Use an expert to determine the causes of variation by doing statistical analysis and continuously improve your measurement systems to ensure better control. Ensure that the experts are continuously developed so that they can
They both work by the way. They will both solve problems and save money. So the question is, which system is the most effiicient and effective at solving problems and saving money. For the energy put in, what do you get out.
This is where my experience is that six sigma often ignores common sense. Too many people spend inordinate amounts of time statistically proving and determining significance to responses that an associates already knows to be true through years of trial and error. What the expert has to learn is already common sense to the operator.
My experience is that every time a green or black belt project comes to a conclusion with real corrective actions that actually save the company a lot of money, the associates running that process have known and likely been begging for those corrective actions for quite a while. In fact, what I often see is a project being completed to do the statistical analysis after the corrective actions are already being put into place. Their analysis shows a great impact to the company (all credit given to Six Sigma with publications to come...) but the analysis was completely unnecessary in order for the project to be executed.
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07/16/2012 10:10 AM
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Kris:
Some explanations from the Internet:
"Common sense is something that comes to you naturally, its like an instinct. Critical thinking is when you take a question or a problem and analize every aspect of it."
Albert Einstein famously said, "Common Sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."
"The purpose of Common Sense is to enable one to function "well" inside the society, that is, its purpose is to provide a framework for making the "proper" decision when faced with a commonly-occurring problem or issue. Common Sense is thus highly cultural and locale-specific, as the entire purpose of it is to make your immediate life easier inside your community. Thus, it tends to be a collection of "works best" approximations, rather than some logical framework for deduction of truth."
"Critical Thinking (or better: Critical Analysis) is a discipline of Logic, wherein a framework of principles has been created to discover the cause, impetus, and possible outcome(s) of a situation. This framework focuses on factual events and uses the theories of logical analysis and deduction to postulate WHY something happened, and WHAT the possible impacts are of different responses to the problem/issue."
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07/16/2012 10:10 AM
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Kris, from http://www.criticalthinking.org/
The Common Denominators of Critical Thinking Are the Most Important By-products of the History of Critical Thinking
We now recognize that critical thinking, by its very nature, requires, for example, the systematic monitoring of thought; that thinking, to be critical, must not be accepted at face value but must be analyzed and assessed for its clarity, accuracy, relevance, depth, breadth, and logicalness. We now recognize that critical thinking, by its very nature, requires, for example, the recognition that all reasoning occurs within points of view and frames of reference; that all reasoning proceeds from some goals and objectives, has an informational base; that all data when used in reasoning must be interpreted, that interpretation involves concepts; that concepts entail assumptions, and that all basic inferences in thought have implications. We now recognize that each of these dimensions of thinking need to be monitored and that problems of thinking can occur in any of them.
The result of the collective contribution of the history of critical thought is that the basic questions of Socrates can now be much more powerfully and focally framed and used. In every domain of human thought, and within every use of reasoning within any domain, it is now possible to question:
. ends and objectives,
. the status and wording of questions,
. the sources of information and fact,
. the method and quality of information collection,
. the mode of judgment and reasoning used,
. the concepts that make that reasoning possible,
. the assumptions that underlie concepts in use,
. the implications that follow from their use, and
. the point of view or frame of reference within which reasoning takes place.
In other words, questioning that focuses on these fundamentals of thought and reasoning are now baseline in critical thinking. It is beyond question that intellectual errors or mistakes can occur in any of these dimensions, and that students need to be fluent in talking about these structures and standards.
Sam Tomas
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07/16/2012 10:10 AM
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A very wise man once said:
"Common sense is neither."
I rest my case. And by the way Kris, I absolutely agree with you on the over-analysis thing.
Tom
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07/16/2012 10:10 AM
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In trying to answer the original question posed, I think Kris raised the question of the role of the person actually doing the work, the associate. And this is where I believe, the critical difference between Lean and Six Sigma lies. In 1979, Konosuke Matsushita verbally mugged a group of Western business leaders who were visiting Japan to try and understand the "Japanese miracle". I can, if requested, paste the whole speech, but in essence he was suggesting that their problems lay not in the hands of their workers, but in these leaders' heads. Over three decades later very little seems to have changed in those heads. Although Toyota's "respect for people" is well intend, like the term common sense, it is more often misinterpreted and seen as the need for the occasional group hug. Matsushita was suggesting that no organisation would be able to survive in the future without engaging the intellect of every worker in that organisation.
For me the difference between Lean and Six Sigma is not in the lists of tools each possesses (there is a huge overlap between the two), but in their approaches to improvement. Six Sigma fits well with most organisational thinking, because most organisations are structured around class or caste barriers. The hierarchy of experts in the form of Master Black Belts, Black Belts, Green and various descending orders of colour fits well into these structures, because "common sense" suggests that any problem that needs to be solved, that is not part of the day-to-day work requires an expert; the people who actually do the work do not have that capability and they are more productive (statistically) if they produced rather than worrying about problems.
Lean, and here I mean the true sense of this term, is about getting the workforce (sorry, I meant associates) solving problems for themselves. So Lean is not just about the elimination of waste, but the learning associated with a robust and healthy kaizen culture that helps increase the problem-solving capabilities of everyone, including the CEO. I accept that at the start of the Lean journey one will need the help of good teachers, but unfortunately these (often) external consultants are given the job, by ignorant leadership, to go and make a particular process or department or organisation Lean: the leadership is not to be bothered during the change process. In such circumstances, there is a strong temptation to meet deadlines and do the work without involving any of the associates. This is the probably the reason why the majority of Lean initiatives fail.
I do accept that engaging the workforce is very tough, nearly impossible, and takes longer which is not what the average CEO anticipates (as he/she believes this can be done by lunchtime next Tuesday). However, as the great Dr Deming once suggested, there is no such thing as instant pudding.
It was suggested earlier in this discussion that Six Sigma focused on variation and Lean did not. One of the foundations of my understanding of Lean is the 3Ms. From my understanding, "Mura" is about unevenness, which I like to think of as variation. I don't think some of the Lean techniques, such as kanban, would function if the variation was wild. Yes, Six Sigma has a larger array of "big-boys' sums" to understand and solve problems related to variation. But I have yet to hear of a Black Belt who has attempted to tackle one of the most common and harmful forms of variation: leadership behaviour. We tolerate variation in leadership behaviour as individual eccentricities even though "common sense" tells us that some of these eccentricities are highly damaging. I suggest Lean is probably better at tackling this form of variation.
Finally, the original question asked how these two were related to TQM. It is probably simplest to see them as evolving from, not just TQM, but all the hard work done by so many who looked at better ways of making how we work, work.
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07/16/2012 10:10 AM
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Let me step back to the original question: What'S the difference?
For me TQM is how it all begun. It's the ancestor of both.
And the difference between lean and 6S is for me the applicability. Both methods train and teach problem solving. It's not the question about which is better.
SixSigma can be applied in every company, if the managers understand it or not, since the "ownership" of the method is passed down to the experts. SixSigma tries to catch the state of a complete system, and breaks it down to the critial points to make it measurable and solvable.
Lean is the outcome of a learning organisation, it's all about proper managing. It's far more than tools (in fact many lean lean tools are quite trivial) - it's more of the philosophy behind. In Lean you accept that everything is a system and you are never able to catch the full state of a system, so you approach EVERY problem, one by one, knowing that with every change the whole system will change. To go this way you need trained and wise managers, otherwise you're doomed.
I believe Sixsigma is better suited for the production, whereas lean can also be applied in management. And for me (sorry to say that) "lean six sigma" is just a marketing gag. It's still SixSigma, and it's more accessible than pure SixSigma - but it totally misses the point in the real lean philosophy (just search for the Katas in LSS)
So to say: both are good, and it's irrelevant which is better, just remember to pick the right one based on your circumstances. And then stick to it, don't dilute.
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