Tri-Cities Quality Forum 2012

I think that a forum discussing quality improvement and analysis qualifies as something nerdy even if it isn't in the entertainment sector so here are my thoughts on the portions that I attended.

The Tri-Cities Quality Forum 2012 had David McClaskey as the keynote speaker.  He is the president of Pal's Business Excellence Institute and gave his address focusing on what the spoke on what his company does to help others improve their quality.  When I attended last year, I heard speakers from two different companies talk about how they had used the principles from Pal's BEI to dramatically improve their quality.  One was a restaurant and the other a gas station/convenience store.  Hearing the basics from David McClaskey brought those previous presentations to the forefront of my mind.  The most important principles (to me) are (1) to strive for 100% right 100% of the time even though you know that it is an unreachable goal and (2) never make the job easier to do wrong than to do right. There were of course several other principles, but these stuck in my head the most.

Because I am a stay-at-home mom right now, I don't get very many opportunities to think about things from a business or scientific perspective.  However, the nice thing about these types of presentations is that they are very general and broad.  They have to be in order to reach out to businesses running the gamut from restaurants to convenience stores to hospitals to chemical companies.  The two principles I mentioned above stuck in my head because I could see how to apply them to my daily life.  As an individual, I should strive to achieve perfect eventually by giving myself clear expectations and holding myself accountable for both failures and success.  I can do the same for my son by giving him clear expectations and holding him accountable for failures but also giving praise for his successes.

This relates directly to the second principle: never make the job easier to do wrong than to do right.  If I always fix everything for my son, he never learns to take responsibility for himself and never learns from his mistakes.  He only learns to make mistakes so that I will do it all for him.  Other than fixing other people's mistakes for them, we can also make the job easier to do wrong than right by never admitting to them that they have failed.  Too often we tell children that everyone is a winner and any effort is praiseworthy.  The truth is that people fail all the time, but if we never tell them they've failed, they will never learn to do it right because wrong is just so much easier.

The breakout session I attended was "How to Lie With Statistics" by Mark Ewing (no relation to the book by the same title).  This presentation focused on the things that people frequently do with statistics that lead to intentional or unintentional lies.

1. Claiming a difference between things when a statistical tie is the reality.  It doesn't mean there isn't a difference; it just means the data can't tell us what that difference is.  This is especially common during political election seasons.
2. Poor data collection resulting in an unrepresentative sample.  When this happens, you just can't make the claims you want to about the "population."
3. Excessively wide confidence intervals (resulting from a variety of things) leading to a meaningless point estimate.  When people only then report the point estimate, this misleads the recipients of the information.
4. Multiplicity of error.  If you keep on looking and keep on looking for connections between things that aren't there without adjusting your statistical methods, you're going to find things just by coincidence.

I really enjoyed the presentation (even though I already knew everything) and hope that other's attended might become more reliable consumers and producers of information.