Improvement Insights Blog
More than One Way to Ken a Stat
There’s often more than one way to get an answer with statistics.
“I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma for Hospitals” and QI Macros [software].
“The other week we had somebody call in and say, “Can you do XYZ stat?” Well, by that name I didn’t understand what they were talking about, but then I looked up XYZ stat and it was our ABC stat in the QI Macros. Right?
“There’s more than one way to do things in statistics. There’s all kinds of things, all right? I just found out about something called Dixon’s Q and Grubbs’ Outlier Test for small samples… okay. If you have an outlier, a control chart is probably going to find it anyway, but this was a different thing. You could use a short run chart and the short run chart might be able to do that for you as well.
“So there’s lots of different ways to get to an outcome; there’s not just one right way. My mom always used to say “There’s more than one way to skin a cat,” which sounds bad to me, but I got this… My brain played with that and I thought, “There’s more than one way to ken a stat” (to understand a stat). There’s more than one stat that can do what you’re asking for.
“So that’s my Insight for this week: Don’t be baffled by whatever it is. There’s probably more than one way to ken that stat, and you can just go figure those things out or you can reach out to us through chat and we can probably tell you what we know about that stat. How did we ken that stat? Maybe we don’t know about it, but we can go figure it out. All right?
“That’s my Improvement Insight for this week: There’s more than one way to ken a stat, lad. Go figure out what it is.”
