
Ishikawa diagram - dedalus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishikawa_diagram
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cygned
A 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
But did things improve?

~~~
cygned
Oh 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.

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asplake
Great 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
When 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_Diag...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishikawa_diagram#Fishbone_Diagram_in_Lean)

~~~
karateka
I 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.

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syntaxing
I'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.

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exdsq
> Interrelationships between causes are not easily identifiable

This.

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mindcrime
Ishikawa 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
> 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".

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andrewflnr
Interestingly, 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.

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stareatgoats
At least a great step forward from the default notion that everything has but
one cause (maybe two).

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thanatropism
People 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.

