1. © Cotton Innovations Ltd 2013
For further information on this subject and other business tools contact:
Brad Cotton – brad@cottonci.com
Telephone +44 (0)7867 305 043
Other newsletters at cottonci.com/blogs
Often in life we see things
the way we want to see
them rather than what is
really happening. Seeing
these as they are requires
bravery whereas seeing
them in isolation could be considered
foolhardy.
I was struck this month when talking to clients over
their data in the way they interpret it.
Take, for example
a roulette wheel,
the draw on lottery,
or the roll of a die.
If we look at a
limited data set we
find that certain numbers keep
occurring. Also people favour certain patterns in
black or red, or certain faces of a die. The way we
see data causes us to read patterns, associations
and dependencies that may not be true. (When
doing this over a limited data set we call this short
term data.) The mistake we make here is that the
random selection of the next number in these
systems is somehow dependant on the previous
numbers. In these systems this is not the case,
because the ball and the die cannot affect the next
outcome.
“We can find that certain numbers
keep occurring”
Extending the data set to let’s say - 2000 rolls of a
die, a year’s of draws on the lottery or a month’s
worth of roulette scores - we find that every
number, face and colour is scored equally. (This
we would call long term data.)
The difference between these two versions of data
is called the ‘Alpha and Beta risk’ by statisticians,
which is basically the risk of calling something bad
when it’s good, or the other way round.
Now let’s consider your processes, where
dependencies may exist, but we miss them, or that
don’t exist and we make them.
In British law, we have
‘three truths’. These are
called “the Truth, the
Whole Truth, and Nothing
but the Truth”.
How often do we only look
at the first truth? This is best described as living
only by short term data.
Short term data is taken from the ‘last unit’ of time.
In some cases, this this can be the last hour, last
batch of the day or the week. Taking information
from this time period gives us a picture of what we
want to see, or confirm what is often suspected –
that everything is inconclusive, or worst still, our
problem has gone away. The nice thing about this
data is that it’s fast to collect and easily accessible.
Now let us move to the second truth - “the Whole
Truth”. Here the data is reflective of the process
but the method of collection has a bias in it, which
will favour a particular outcome through editing or
adjustment.
The ‘last truth’ is the hardest
to get and it generally hurts
the most. “Nothing but the
Truth” demands that we
collect all the reasons for the
data being the way it is. We want the 6 classical
areas of process (People, Methods,
Measurement, Materials, Environment, and
Machines) to be included in the data. Only now we
have a chance to really understand situation.
So my challenge to you is: Which level of truth are
you operating with? And what do you require to
better understand the whole picture?