5 ms·
Ishikawa diagram
- asplake 7y agoGreat if you’re genuinely in the world of cause and effect, but most interesting problems aren’t really like that. You’re either experimenting (“sending probes”) to test the impact of different things, or focussing somewhere more productive, like the outcomes achievable were the problem to be overcome, bypassed, or simply ignored.
- trhway 7y agoWhen a Six Sigma/Lean/Agile black belt(s) is thrust upon your team/dept/org they would cause a great pain by forcing the cognitive dissonance between those 2 worlds upon you. You'd feel these fishbones like they are really in your throat and sticking right into your brain from inside there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishikawa_diagram#Fishbone_Diagram_in_Lean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishikawa_diagram#Fishbone_Diag...
- asplake 7y agoMany Lean folks do get it, but clearly not all...
- karateka 7y agoI can't believe there is actually such a title as an "Agile Black Belt". Had to Google it to make sure. Not sure Jigoro Kano would be happy to see his belt system used as a marketing buzzword.
- zhte415 7y agoA good black belt is an exceptional communicator, not the only skill, but one of them. They shouldn't make people feel fishbones are in their throat, but working through others' skills, especially SMEs and people on the floor, perhaps more so working with the team rather than with management of the team; the reason they're there is because management don't have the bandwidth, experience, or have other problems, preventing improvement.
- exdsq 7y ago> Interrelationships between causes are not easily identifiable This.
- cygned 7y agoA friend of mine was building a house which involved a couple of workers from different companies. He was not happy with the progress and how they did that. He didn’t really had any idea of how to construct a house, but he was a 6sigma black belt quality manager. One day, he showed up at the construction site, got all the workers together, created a fishbone diagram with them and led the rest of the constructing like a typical project.
- jagged-chisel 7y agoBut did things improve?
- cygned 7y agoOh yeah, they did finish the "project" successfully fulfilling his requirements. He was working as a turnaround manager back then, so I guess he knew what to do to improve processes and results.
- stareatgoats 7y agoAt least a great step forward from the default notion that everything has but one cause (maybe two).
- thanatropism 7y agoPeople often question whether philosophy is still worth “doing” in this age of ConvNets and cryptocurrency. But one of the things I learned studying philosophy is that there is no root cause.
- syntaxing 7y agoI'm a huge fan of CAPA (corrective and preventive action) which is like a mini-version of root cause analysis and planning. One of the things that I struggled with when I was younger was if there was a problem, a lot engineers have different ideas on the root cause but getting the data is usually too time consuming. But asking the 5 why's really help you focus on the highest probable root cause.
- mindcrime 7y agoIshikawa diagrams (aka Fishbone diagrams) aren't always the right tool to use, (see other comments) but when they are useful, they are very useful. I'd never used them before my time at Lenovo, and while I was there I gained a considerable appreciation for their utility. Note that I consider the bulk of that utility to be in communicating to upper management. They are useful in and of themselves, but only at a certain level of detail. I also came to appreciate using WBS diagrams (Work Breakdown Structure) for pretty much the same reason(s) and largely with the same constraints.
- blaser-waffle 7y ago> Note that I consider the bulk of that utility to be in communicating to upper management. A massive amount of software, tools, and techniques exist entirely for that purpose. Best advice I heard was something like "treat them like children: bright colors, short slides, easy to grasp charts".
- moftz 7y agoI've used them for root cause analysis. Sometimes it really does help when you are just absolutely clueless on what the problem could be. Other times, you end up just wasting time trying to figure out other branches that could be causing the problem when you already have a general idea of the cause. It can be an effective tool when used by the right person at the right time.
- andrewflnr 7y agoInterestingly, a friend of mine in a writing group recommended these to me as a way of organizing ideas for the plot of a novel, specifically the reasons that things happen in the story. They're not at all specific to business or any other field in their essentials.