Quality Progress / June 1997 67 SESSION TITLED “H OW to Effectively Apply Statistical Thinking in Your Organization” was held at the 1996 Fall Technical Conference in Scottsdale, AZ. The session was sponsored by ASQC’s Statistics Division as part of its ongoing tactical plan to promote the broad application of statistical thinking. The goal of the session was to help attendees develop their ability to apply statistical thinking, not just understand the concepts. To do this, the session’s organizers and presenters decided that the attendees had to actually experience statistical thinking. This led to the development of an inter- active session in which attendees worked in teams to respond to realistic scenarios and then com- pared their responses to those from a panel of experts who had previously seen them. (For more information on how this interactive session was conducted, see the sidebar “How the Session Was Organized.”) The panel of experts consisted of Heero Hacquebord (a management consultant in continuous improvement), Lloyd Nelson (a Nashua Corp. retiree and regular contributor to Journal of Quality Technology), and Ronald Snee (senior consultant for Joiner Associates at the time, who is now a senior consultant with Nynex Corp.). What follows is a look at the scenarios and the responses to them by the experts and the teams. But before this information is shared, one first has to understand what is meant by statistical thinking, how it differs from statistical methods, and how it can be applied at all organizational levels. What is statistical thinking? While statistical thinking has become some- what of a buzzword lately, the operational defini- tion is: 1 Statistical thinking is a philosophy of learning and action based on the following fundamental principles: • All work occurs in a system of intercon- nected processes. • Variation exists in all processes. • Understanding and reducing variation are keys to success. The term “philosophy” is used to indicate that statistical thinking is a set of thought processes rather than number crunching or the use of a par- ticular tool. This is the key distinction between sta- tistical thinking and statistical methods (see Figure 1). Statistical thinking is a philosophy of learning and action in that it relates to how people take in and process information (learning) as well as how they respond to it (action). As the operational definition indicates, three principles must be followed if statistical thinking is to be applied. The first principle—all work occurs in a system of interconnected processes—empha- sizes two points: • Work needs to be viewed as a process that can be studied and improved, thereby improving its results. This concept is the foundation of the modern quality movement. • Processes do not operate in isolation but rather intertwine with the rest of the system. This is sometimes referred to as systems thinking and explains why suboptimizing parts of a system can have disastrous effects on the system as a whole. The second principle—variation exists in all processes—is a fact of life. While this might appear to be common sense, many business stu- dents are taught that actual financial figures should always equal budget and many science students are taught that mass balances should resolve exactly. How to Teach Others to Apply Statistical Thinking Using an interactive session is much more effective than lecturing. by Galen Britz, Don Emerling, Lynne Hare, Roger Hoerl, and Janice Shade A Figure 1. The Relationship Between Statistical Thinking and Statistical Methods Process Variation Data Statistical tools Statistical thinking Statistical methods