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Understanding Variation: Managing Chaos
Understanding Variation: Managing Chaos
March 31, 2025
by Mitch Robinson
Donald Wheeler teaches WHY and how to use Walter Shewhart's control charts before giving in to the apparent implications of everyday, noisy data.
This quote is from Understanding Variation: The Key to Managing Chaos, by Donald Wheeler, and perhaps it has just changed your life. Check out the book if you're interested in a bit of profound knowledge.
“Every data set contains noise.
“Every data set contains noise.
Some data sets also contain signals.
Some data sets also contain signals.
Before you can detect the signals within your data,
Before you can detect the signals within your data,
you must filter out the noise.”
you must filter out the noise.”
-Wheeler
If your company is comparing sales or defects or shipments "month over month" or "versus this time last year" they are wasting everyone's time and attention. Learn about the nature of variance in statistics and save a string of pointless meetings!
Get yourself a copy of this "cult classic" for $5.
link: Understanding Variation - The Key to Managing Chaos
"We live in the Information Age, and much of that information comes to us in the form of numbers.
...But before numerical information can be useful it must be analyzed, interpreted, and assimilated.
...Unfortunately, teaching the techniques for making sense of data has been neglected at all levels of our educational system.
...As a result, throughout culture there is little appreciation of how to effectively use the volumes of data generated by both business and government. This book can remedy that situation.
...Readers report that this book as changed both the way they look a data and the very form of their monthly reports. It has turned arguments about the numbers into a common understanding of what needs to be done about them. These techniques and benefits have been thoroughly proven in a wide variety of settings. Read this book and use the techniques to gain the benefits for your company."
If nothing else check out the mind-bending examples of how well-meaning managers inadvertently manipulated their actions to satisfy metrics, usually to show progress or improvement, much to the detriment of their businesses.
I'll take the OVER if we're betting:
"This still happens in 95% of companies and almost everybody is blind to the underlying facts."
Bobby Fischer - Where is He?
Bobby Fischer - Where is He?
or "Why Manufacturing is like 4D Chess"
or "Why Manufacturing is like 4D Chess"
January 2025
by Mitch Robinson
One of 960 possible starting setups in Chess960
Manufacturing Excellence
Beyond the Standard Playbook
G.O.A.T. Chess Grandmaster Bobby Fischer grew to dislike standard chess. He felt the ultimate strategy sport had devolved into memorization and regurgitation rather than the calculating thought process that made him exceptional. Introduce one bit of nuance, and his mastery became untouchable even among elite players.
His creation, Chess960 (aka Fischer Random Chess), highlights the crucial difference between memorized patterns and true strategic understanding.
By the book, there's no way to prepare or memorize attacks and defenses, so in Fischer Random Chess it's brains vs books.
Manufacturing improvement often faces a similar challenge. Your last consultant may have arrived with pre-printed templates and rehearsed presentations, armed with a phrasebook of Japanese terminology that creates an artificial barrier to understanding. They present Toyota's Production System as if it were a sequence of memorized chess openings.
But your facility isn't a static game board:
No More Games: There's no limitation on the complexity! Forget one move per turn, defined components, guidelines, gambits, calculated positional advantages,
As real as it gets: we've got an Excel spreadsheet with 222 conflicting metrics and a quality inspection department who spends 80% of their time fixing defects.
Manufacturing and operations management entails infinite variables, unknowns, projections, constant streams of simultaneous and sometimes competing actions and departments, dynamic conditions, material shortages, poor prioritization, filtering out or overreacting to noise and squeaky wheels, judgment calls,
In today's first hour of production, your system has already navigated more complexity than exists in the entire history of recorded standard operating procedures.
So when process improvement feels regurgitated, it's usually because someone applied a copy-paste approach:
Deploy 5S
Map Value Stream
Kaizen "Event"
Rearrange Cell Layout
???
Exit
This formulaic approach ignores the very facts of life!
Fischer revolutionized chess by challenging conventional patterns, and transformative manufacturing improvement requires understanding your specific system's dynamics.
Let's move beyond standard playbooks. Together, we'll analyze your actual challenges and develop solutions that address your facility's specific variables and constraints.
Let's solve this together. Click to Connect
These rags may be the only lasting proof of a
Zero Point 5 S event.
5S > 0.5S
5S > 0.5S
December 2024
by Mitch Robinson
Here it is,
The famous 5S list:
The famous 5S list:
- Sort (Seiri)
- Set in order (Seiton)
- Shine (Seiso)
- Standardize (Seiketsu)
- Sustain (Shitsuke)*
You've seen it. Perhaps you've even contributed to a great "5S Event," or worse, a bad one. A whirlwind week of throwing away garbage, arranging shelves, and testing your trigger finger with a relentless deluge of cleaning spray.
We could summarize that event in the following steps.
Seriously (why is there garbage literally everywhere?)
Shelves (arrange everything on the shelves like a grocery clerk)
Spray (it'll help transfer 16 years of shop dust to these shiny new Shop Rags TM)
Show off the before and after photos.
See ya 👋
Might we award half a point for effort. 1/2 S.
Abolish Half- Ess events that begin and end with blue jeans, cleaning spray, and a bundle of Shop Rags(TM).
If there is not a standard system to constantly sort (what stays, and why, while everything else goes!), sweep, and set in order, plus the sustaining motivator and empowerment to keep it up, it was closer to "zero-point-five" S.
Mathematical Proof that 1/2 S is inferior to 5S:
0.5 = 1/2
1/2 < 5
(0.5)(S) = (1/2)(S) = (Half)(S) < 5S
QED
Going beyond the One Week Wonder
Going beyond the One Week Wonder
Yes, that "Half-S EVENT" might have been a much-needed spring cleaning. No argument there.
But weren't we aiming for something more than a
But weren't we aiming for something more than a
watered-down Windex waste of a week?
watered-down Windex waste of a week?
Real transformation includes:
Systematic sorting with clear retention criteria
Sustainable organization systems
Regular cleaning protocols and convenient supplies
Standardized work methods
Area ownership and dedicated maintenance time
Centralized audit system with actionable tracking
Empowered teams
Leadership Makes the Difference
Leadership Makes the Difference
I've never seen a successful 5S program without active sponsorship from the president or site manager. Consider FastCap's Paul Akers, who simplified 5S to 3S - not through reduction, but through evolution. When high standards and inherent sustainability became part of the company's DNA, they no longer needed formal quantification.
This is possible for FastCap as the result of two decades of nurturing a culture of excellence.
Banished sloppiness, natural order, and infectious enthusiasm.
Check out Paul's books, free in several formats, at his website.
My recommendations are Banish Sloppiness and 2 Second Lean.
Like planting a tree --- The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is today.
The best time to take 5S seriously was twenty years ago. The next best time is now.
Ready to transform your operation beyond surface-level cleaning solutions?
If you need help getting your S's together, Click to Connect
*Aren't we so lucky someone was able to match the cosmic,
true and correct, Japanese terms with some
comparable English words
that convey roughly the same meanings?
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