Lies, Damned Lies, and...Checklists

Continuous improvement should be a process of discovery. Tools like checklists and roadmaps should support and guide, but not overshadow, critical thinking.

The Tool that Matters: Thinking

Take this quote from a Lean Six Sigma deployment leader:

The objective is reasonable, and the statement seems benign on the surface. But quicksand also looks pretty safe until you step into it. In this case, the issue is the assumed solution of a “checklist of tools.”

To clarify, checklists themselves are not the problem. They are powerful and useful tools for managing complexity. They help reduce variability and prevent errors. But checklists are only warranted when you have a group of items or sequence of actions that are known to be significant. Examples include pre-flight checklists, pre-surgery checklists, software implementation plans, and even grocery lists.

But when you don’t know what is significant, then you are on a mission of discovery. And discovery is driven by questions, not predefined answers or prescribed tools. Lean Six Sigma DMAIC projects are such voyages of discovery. They are about developing new knowledge, not implementing known solutions; and such discovery must be question-driven. At the outset, the significance lies solely in the questions. The answers and methods required to uncover them cannot be predetermined. There is no shortcut past thinking.

Leave the Questions off Your Checklist

Adding to the confusion, sometimes answers are mistakenly referred to as ‘deliverables’ – a predefined desirable output or work product – but that misses the point a bit. Deliverables are the expression of answers, not the answers themselves.

So, what does that mean?

Let’s take the project charter as an example. The charter is a deliverable. If crafted correctly, it should embody the answers to critical questions, like:

• “What is the problem?”
• “Why are we working on this?”
• “Who is going to do the work?”
• “What does success look like?”
• “When does the project need to be completed?”

I’ve seen project management templates that consist solely of required tools and deliverables, but no mention of the tools answering the questions, or being embodied in those deliverables. Skipping the important questions causes a loss of context and slows the development of critical thinking skills.

Grouping the critical questions of an improvement project into a useful sequence facilitates organized thinking and efficient project management. And that’s precisely what the DMAIC roadmap does. It’s not a roadmap of tool usage, it’s a roadmap of questions to answer to uncover the truth and implement change.

There are certainly lots of tools to use when answering those questions. And said tools must be taught and learned in a coherent fashion, which is why DMAIC is often confused as a checklist of tools rather than a checklist of critical questions. In my opinion, it should be all about the questions.

Thinking Still Required

A while back, Lean Six Sigma veteran Mike Carnell made an interesting observation:

Checklists of things to do are the antithesis of creativity – that’s the whole point after all – to drive out variability when it is unwelcome. You really don’t want variability when confirming that a plane is ready to fly over a large body of water.

A discovery process on the other hand, is dependent on creativity because it’s about developing new knowledge and inventive solutions. A checklist with an item that reads “generate creative solution” is not useful.

But critical questions can drive that creative process when those questions are used as the guiding principle of DMAIC rather than checklists of tools to use by phase. It’s harder to teach project leaders, or “belts” to think critically – to ask the right questions and then pick the proper tools to answer those questions – but you end up with people who actually think about what they are doing and why they are doing it.

And thinking is still the driver of process improvement!