Yogi Berra once said, “If people don’t want to come out to the ballpark, how are you going to stop them?” I have found the same is true of statistical process control (SPC).

As the author of the QI Macros SPC Software for Excel, I get emails every week asking, “What’s the right chart to use for my data?” People are terrified of getting it wrong. Somehow, we have made newly minted Green Belts and Black Belts terrified of using the wrong chart or statistic and having someone challenge them on it.

People don’t want to look stupid. So rather than make a mistake, they hesitate.

In the quality community and related publications, a lot of energy is dedicated to getting people to do SPC “right.” I’ve found that the issue isn’t getting them to do it “right,” but getting them to do it at all.

Or, to paraphrase Yogi: “If people are too afraid to use SPC, how you gonna to stop ’em?”

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