Lean Six Sigma Green Belt – Six Sigma Improve Phase Part 2

3. De Bono 6 Thinking Hats

Here are the various colors of the hats. Blue, white, yellow, red, black and green. Right? What is the 6th hat thinking all about? We’re going to do a deep dive on that. But first, let us understand who has developed this technique. Such an interesting technique, isn’t it? Right? It’s fun to do this. Trust me. All right. Dr. Edward Dubunu developed a technique for helping teams stay focused on creative problem solving by avoiding the negativity and group arguments.

You get rid of the negativity. You get rid of the group arguments by using Dubai no six Hat Thinking. This technique is called the six Thinking Hats. It can be used to enhance the team creativity and evaluate the ideas. This technique can be applied during solutions or idea generation and also can assist in building consensus. You can reach a common conclusion based on consensus. Everyone together agree to a solution that is consensus. This technique has been used worldwide in a variety of corporations with profound results. Person who wears a white hat has to be neutral and objective.

Person who’s going to wear a red hat should be emotional and intuitive. A person who wears a black hat should be cautious and careful. Person who wears a yellow hat should speak about hope, positive and speculative thoughts. Solutions wasn’t aware. So green hat is going to focus on creative and lateral thinking. And blue hat gives solutions in a controlled and organized manner by thinking in that way. Let us discuss about all these hats in detail.

Now here we move on. Here are the weightiest hats. That’s the yellow hat. What happens in the yellow? Let us do it the other way around just for now. All right? Yellow hat is for optimism and a positive view of things. When this hat is in use, teams look at the logical benefits of the proposal. And every green hat, every green hat idea deserves some yellow hat addition. What is a green hat then?

The green hat makes time and space available for creative thinking. When this green hat is in use, the team is encouraged to use divergent thinking and explore alternative ideas or options. Basically. Then we have the blue hat. What is blue hat all about? Blue hat is used for control of the brainstorming process.

The blue hat helps teams evaluate the thinking side and determine if it is appropriate or not. This hat allows members to ask for summaries and helps the team progress when it appears to be off track. It is useful for thinking about thinking about thinking. You think about thoughts that is blue hat all about. Let us move on to discuss about the black hat.

Black hat thinking calls for caution and critical judgment. Using this hat helps team a white group think and proposing unrealistic solutions. This hat should be used with caution so that creativity is not sufficient. Then we have the red hat. Red hat gives team members the opportunity to present their feelings or intuitive or intuition about the subject without explanation or need for justification. Speak out your feelings, speak out your intuition, right? And you need not provide me any justification.

Now the red hat helps teams surface conflict and air feelings openly with our fear of retribution. There won’t be any conflicts here because you need not provide any explanation, you need not provide any justification. Use of this hat encourages risk taking and right brain thinking. We have left brain thinking and right brain thinking. It’s right brain thinking basically. The white hat thinking then requires team members to collect only the data and information at hand.

While WhiteHat thinking is in progress, participants put aside proposals, they put aside arguments and individual options and they’re going to review only what information is available or required. Now this is about the interesting six hat thinking process. This is the technique all about. Now a well experienced person is going to use a suitable hat to get the job done. You can play the six hat thinking basically as a game and there are two ways which people normally play. Let’s look into the method.

One, everyone has a different hat, different radiant of hat. One person might wear a red hat, another person might wear a white hat. Another person might wear black hat. Another person might wear blue, green, yellow, so on and so forth.

So a thinker puts on or takes off one of the hats. A facilitator asks a thinker to put on or off one of the hats. I as a facilitator will say hey, put on the black hat and you’ll have to give me solutions with caution and critical judgment if you wear black hat and then I’ll say switch to blue hat. And the blue hat is used for control of the brainstorming process. So I as a facilitator might dedicate you on what hat you’re going to wear.

All tinker is assigned a different hat to wear for a period of time in a round robin fashion. Probably allows person a to wear white hat for the first round of discretion, red hat for the second round of discussion. Allow him wear a black hat for the third round of discussion and I’ll have him wear a blue hat for the fourth round of discretion, so on and so forth. All thinkers wear hats they do not normally wear. Probably a person does not wear white hat for significant amount of this particular technique.

And then I will say that hey, you have not wore white hats so can you please wear a white hat and provide me solutions based on the data and information available with you? And then we have method two, everyone wears the same hat except the facilitator, right? Facilitator might wear a blue hat which indicates when a change hat and what had to wear. It indicates when to change hats and what had to wear. And blue hat menu is used for control of the Brain Storming process. So it makes sense if a facilitator weighs a blue hat rather than any of the other color hats. All right, this is all about the Bono 650.

4. Creative Thinking – Probing, Benchmarking

Creative thinking or probing is one another technique which helps you identify the best solution. Now, probing is considered the child’s method. Look at that image wherein there is a child who is wearing a thinking cap here, right? Probing is considered the child’s method. Do you know what? Children learn more through probing their parents. Though they most often are not oriented the parents by asking some really thought provoking questions, right? They learn through probing their parents, family and friends. It’s similar to the auditors who probe a lot to get the requisite information. Journalists use it to remove layers of hidden information. Journalists also use this probing technique.

Now, scientists also use the probing technique themselves to think more on the challenges they may face as in how they progress. Why do we have this process step? Right? This is one kind of question which will help you create which will help you arrive at the solutions using probing technique. Who else could be doing this? How can we change? So, these are all the probing questions. What can we alter? When else can activity be performed? Can we remove or replace this activity with something else? Can we combine some tasks? Can we apply some learning from other sources? Can we minimize the impact of certain aspects? Can we maximize impact of certain aspects? Can we rearrange sequence of steps? All these are the bunch of questions which one might want to use as part of creative thinking or the probing technique, right? Think about that. Think about a small child or your kid asking you probing questions. It would be a lot of start for working, my dear friends.

Now, let us move on to discuss about benchmarking. What are the various types of benchmarking which are available? One is strategic. What do we mean by strategic benchmarking? Strategic benchmarking is used to improve overall performance by examining the long term strategies and approaches that enable great performance to succeed. It involves considering core competencies, developing the new products and services, changing the balance of activities and improving capabilities for dealing with changes in the background environment. The next type of benchmarking is competitive benchmarking, similar to Apple and Samsung, right? Competitive benchmarking.

If Apple comes up with an interesting feature, samsung comes up with a similar kind of feature, right? So it’s competitive benchmarking, always. Competitive benchmarking is used when organizations consider their positions in relation to performance characteristics of vital products and services. Benchmarking partners are drawn from the same segment. The third type of benchmarking is process benchmarking. Process benchmarking is used when the focus is on improving detailed critical processes and operations. Partners are sought from best practice organizations that do similar work or deliver comparable services. And next type of benchmarking is functional benchmarking. This functional benchmarking is used when organizations look to benchmark with partners from different business areas of activity. And they do this in order to find ways of improving the functions or what processes there are fewer benchmarking concepts. Let us understand those.

Internal, external and international benchmarking. What do you mean by internal benchmarking? Internal benchmarking seeks partners from within the same organization. The main advantages of internal benchmarking are that sensitive data and information is more accessible, general data are readily available and less time and resources are needed. That is when you go with internal benchmarking. When do you go with external benchmarking? External benchmarking seeks outside organizations that are known to be best in the field. External benchmarking provides the chance to learn from those who are known to be best in class. Although it is important to remember that not every best practice solution can be adopted by others. Right? International benchmarking and this is the last benchmarking technique which we are going to discuss now in this session. International benchmarking seeks partners from other countries because the best organizations are located in other parts of the world or there are too few benchmarking partners within the same country to produce valid results. This is another thing, right? But let us understand more about process benchmarking.

Here we go. Steps Involved in Process Benchmarking first thing is you select the process. Select the process which we want to solve in the process. Right? Sorry. Select the problem. Select the problem which we want to solve in the process. Map the process. Map the actual present process. Who to benchmark. Check and find out which are the companies or competitors doing same type of business and doing better. Try to identify that plan. The benchmark plan for the benchmark visit in the industries selected by the above process. Analyze and act. This is the last step. Analyze the process of benchmark company and good points in own process and then finalize the targets. Hey, did you know this guy? This quick bite, guys. US.

Air Force Logistics Command, whose rapid and reliable parts delivery during the Porsche in Gulf War was a major success story, credits its remarkable efficiency to the benchmarking it did with Federal Express, us. Internal Revenue Service. They have benchmarked their performance with Maryland quality indicators. So organizations of firms or government departments, which are entirely different business, started benchmarking with the best firms in the organization. Benchmarking does multiple things for you. It will help you establish a ballpark figure on where you are as of now, where do you stand as an organization. And then it will help you incorporate the best practices followed in the leading organizations. This is all about the process. Benchmark King now let us move on.