Welcome to The Memory Palace: The Place Where People Come To Dream

Before I start, I’d like to just refer back to my previous posts on the value of emotions in learning. After reading my ‘Self-Taught Teacher’ post, a friend of mine recommended that I look up something called the affective context model; which I Googled and immediately recognised. To be more specific, it was this video that I recognised. I had seen this video on memory a while back, but I forgot (does that count as situational irony?); anyway, credit where credit’s due, this guy gives a slightly more scientific explanation of what I've been discussing. Thanks to Chris as well, for reminding me of it.

Today, I want to continue with my little series on memory by passing on a memory retention technique I first read about in Derren Brown’s book ‘Tricks of the Mind’. Just for the purpose of testing, and to give you a way of judging exactly how well the method I am about to teach you works, I’d like you to take thirty seconds to try and memorise as many things as possible from the list below. Please don’t just skip over them and keep reading, actually read them and try to remember them. It won’t take long and it really will help you to appreciate the method I’m about to discuss.

1. Camera
2. Mug
3. Birthday
4. Book
5. Guitar
6. Cat
7. Pencil
8. Anniversary
9. Apple
10. Toilet roll
11. Hammer
12. Newspaper
13. Milk carton
14. Donkey
15. Snow globe
16. Easter
17. Ninja
18. Dinosaur
19. Duster
20. Paper

Now you’ve had your thirty seconds or so to memorise the list, put it out of view (turn away or minimise the window for a minute) and try to remember as many things as you can without looking at the list. It might help here to write the items down on a piece of paper or in a word processing program if you don’t have paper and pen to hand. Go ahead; I’ll still be here when you get back.

So how did you do (write down how many you got; you’ll want it later)? I suspect you didn’t remember many, and almost certainly not all of them; if you did, you must be either some kind of autistic savant, or a liar. Or you already know a similar method to the one I am about to impart.

Today, I want to continue with my little series on memory by talking about the loci system of remembering things, often referred to as the memory palace. The loci system is a way of remembering things by placing them into a mental projection of an environment, or ‘loci’. For example: You might try remembering a shopping list by picturing the items placed around a room; Cheese on the armchair, celery on the bookshelf, and so on. Once you have sufficiently locked in these images in your mind, you can then return to that image at a later date to recall the information.

The trick to this system is really the locking in of the images, and there are a few tricks that will help in this respect. As I’ve mentioned before, emotions are a great aid in remembering things and, by making your images emotionally striking, you can improve your recall of items in an environment. You might, for example, imagine a large cheese cartoon character sitting in the armchair, smoking a pipe, and reading War and Peace (funny enough?); or a giant stick of celery being used as a bookmark in one of the books on the bookshelf. Try to make the images vivid in your mind; imagine colours as being very bright, and try to add smells or sounds. Try to make the object large, not so large it takes over the room and interferes with other items being remembered, but large enough to fill a chair, cupboard, or window for example. The image also really needs to be interacting environment in a memorable way for it to be attached (such as the cheese being in the armchair and the celery being in the book).

It’s also a good idea to try and stick to existing places. The problem with inventing rooms yourself is that it can be hard to create a solid consistent image, meaning that something you use as an anchor in that room might be there on one occasion but not there the next time you imagine it, because you haven’t set it as a definite feature. That’s not to say you can’t invent your own rooms, but you need to really lock down the contents and layout before you can use it as a loci. For the same reason, you should also avoid attaching things to features that are inconsistent in the real environment. Generally large furniture isn’t moved around too much, so things like sofas, bookcases, and fridges tend to be safe bets. Don’t attach the image to something like a book or a lamp (unless you know that that lamp always is, and will be, there) since these things can be easily moved or even taken out of the room. It might be worth pointing out something mentioned in the video on affective context that I linked at the top of the page. In the video it mentions the idea that something like the train journey to work will essentially be averaged out over time so that we end up mostly remembering the things we see consistently. This rule could be applied to a room you see often. If you’re asked to recall the layout of a room you will most easily recall objects and features that are always there. This is a good thing to consider when picking your locations.

So where do you start? Well I’d say start with your home. This tends to be the place most people have a strong mental image of simply because they’ve spent a lot of time there over the years. You can also use any other particularly memorable place such as the house you grew up in, the school you went to, or even just an especially impressive or interesting building that you‘ve visited. All that matters is that you have strong memories of the location. I play a lot of video games numerous times and, whilst I haven’t personally tried it, it should be theoretically possible to use virtual spaces such as these to aid in memory. In fact, the neurochemical reactions that games can create could help to provide a rich environment for planting your information. You could also be certain that the environment, in most games at least, would not change over time and could be revisited as often as required. Anyway, that all just sounds like an excuse to play videogames, but it would be an interesting experiment.

So now you have an idea of what kind of rooms to use, and images to create; let’s put your memory to the test. Look back up at the list you tried to remember before and, as you go down the list, imagine yourself actually standing in your loci, and begin anchoring the different items around you. Be sure to make the item and it’s interaction with the environment memorable. It may help to start with the feature immediately to your left and work clockwise around the room attaching items to each memorable feature. If the item isn’t really an item but something like an event, you should try and come up with a memorable image which represents that event to you. If you find you start to run out of features in a location, don’t strain to remember extra ones. Remember: the whole point of this is to make memorising things easier; if you have to struggle to remember the thing that is supposed to remind you, it’s not going to be any use. Instead, simply walk to the next room. It doesn’t have to be real-life adjoining room, just the next memorable location. You could even step out into the street or into a park. Continue doing this until you have placed all of the items from the list. I’m intentionally avoiding any specifics here because only you will know the most effective places and images for you. Now grab another piece of paper and test yourself again.

How did you do? If you find that there were any things you couldn’t remember, you may need to come up with a more memorable image. If you forgot a location, don’t use it again, it’s not memorable enough for this purpose. Compare your new score with the number you memorised before. How do they match up? Is there a big difference? There should be. The first time I did this I found I was able to easily remember every item on the list whereas before I could only remember about a handful. The images do fade over time and if the information isn’t important you can just allow this to happen; but I found you should be able to remember your list for maybe a week or so depending on how often you think about it. On the other hand, if it is information you will need often, you will find it gets locked in deeper every time you remember it. The biggest problem with this method is that it can still be difficult to remember numbers. You might be able to attach an emotional reaction to a giant number 2 (brings a tear to my eye actually) but what’s funny about 45,768? There is a relatively simple way to deal with this issue but I’ve gone on long enough for today, so I’ll leave that for a future post.

Feel free to post your before and after scores in the comments below; it would be interesting to see how this worked for different people. And be warned: I will be coming around to your house and testing you soon, so don’t forget or you’ll have me to answer to.

What was I talking about?

Memory is a funny thing. I’ve already mentioned the idea that emotions are a way of making things more memorable, but it can be quite difficult to know what to do with that information. What do you do? Next time someone tells you to remember the date of an event do you think of your dead pet to make yourself sad? Perhaps you spend all your time before an exam flicking through page after page of information and crying with laughter (come to think of it, that’s how I got through my GCSEs)? The blunt answer is no, apart from generally being quite silly things to do, these particular examples wouldn’t work.

There has been quite a bit of research done on how emotions can affect memory, and the two things are generally considered to be closely related. A great example of emotions’ effect on memory actually debunks a commonly held misconception that people are able to perceive things more quickly in an emergency. It had been previously suggested that the reason time appears to slow down in moments of extreme danger was because the body released adrenaline which sped up the body’s reactions and senses. I have heard of a couple of experiments that have put this theory to the test, and you can read about one of them here. Basically, in this experiment, the scientists scared volunteers by dropping them 150 feet, and then tested for sped-up sensory abilities. They did this using a device that tasks the subject with reading numbers, as they fell, from a display that operates at a speed just above ordinary speeds of perception. What they found was that, whilst the volunteers estimated their own plummet was about a third longer than the dives taken by other volunteers, they were still not able to read the device’s display. Admittedly this might be because they were too busy s**tting their pants as they hurtled towards the ground at 70mph, but the scientists concluded that this had more to do with how fear affects memory as opposed to how fear affected reaction times. You can see more on memory vs. experience here.

It’s thought that this has come about through evolution due to the fact that our simian ancestors needed to learn to stay alive. If you’re a happy little primate stumbling around the jungle and you hear a hissing sound followed by a giant reptilian head flying at you firing venom, and your adrenaline kicks in allowing you to narrowly avoid being mauled, the next most important thing is to remember that the next time you hear a hissing sound, you need to run like hell. It basically comes down to instinct.

Whilst fear might be the most obvious example to use here, it's not the only emotion to have this effect. Ever hear someone talk about the first time they saw the love of their life, and how “time seemed to slow down”? Aside from being a nausea inducing cliché, this is actually similar (chemically) to the brains response in times of extreme danger. And if you’re still not convinced consider this: how often do you find yourself remembering an event that causes you to fill up with emotions similar to or the same as the ones you felt when experiencing that event; sadness when thinking of a loved one who has died, sentimental when thinking of an old flame, rage when thinking of an old flame, or mirth when thinking of a funny friend.

A reason why funny people tend to be popular (“The thing I look for most in a guy/girl is someone who can make me laugh”) is that amusement causes the brain to release certain chemicals which can, amongst other things, make a person laugh and generally feel good. If this response is associated strongly enough with a specific person because, for example, they made you laugh a lot when you first met them, or they make you laugh regularly; the sight of that person will trigger the release of a small amount of those same chemicals, making you feel happy to see them. This might explain how an obnoxious person who can make people laugh might still be seen as a desirable person to be around. It’s a bit like mirth being the drug, the person telling the jokes being a drug dealer, and the person laughing being the crack addict.

This release of a small amount of chemicals is necessary for providing context by which we recognise things. It’s a bit like if I say “Don’t think of a red square”; to understand that command you must first think of what a red square is, so that you can then focus on not thinking about it. If someone says “I accidentally saw a bit of Jordan’s TV show the other night”, for you to understand that phrase, you must recall what you can about the things being referenced; whilst this may be a mixture of facts and opinions about Jordan, it will almost invariably involve recalling and re-experiencing your emotional response to Jordan (in my case, leading to bouts of uncontrollable rage, followed by feelings of futility).

To be honest, none of this is really new thinking. In fact, theories about memory’s relation to emotions date back as far as the first millennium BC and are thought to have roots possibly stretching as far back as the ancient Egyptians. Such theories also discuss the importance of visual markers, claiming that even things such as sounds require a mental image to aid in recall. These theories are where we get the basic idea for many mnemonics; a popular one being Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain, the initials of which are the same as the colours of the rainbow (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet) and you may have caught an alternative mnemonic for this at the end of my post on the seven wastes (ROY G BIV) which works for me because it sounds funny.

I think this is an acceptable point to end this blog for the day. You now, hopefully, have a slightly better understanding of how memory can work; and I intend to cover this subject far more extensively in the posts to come. For now, consider that if you can turn something into a funny image, it will make it much easier for you to remember. After all, I’ve managed to remember DMAIC as ‘Duh! Make’, which is the no-nonsense advice given to people implementing the Six Sigma improvement processes; and DMADV as ‘Duh Mad V’, the crazy DJ rapper who body pops into a factory to introduce his new Six Sigma process.

I told you my brain was different.

Alien Toast

You may be familiar with what I have recently heard referred to as 'The Alien Cup of Tea'. This is an exercise I first came across in my A-level English class, and it involves trying to explain how to make a cup of tea in a way that someone who has never seen a kettle, teapot, tea bags, or mugs before could understand. Essentially, as if you were explaining it to an alien. This is a very interesting exercise because it not only challenges your language skills but also your ability to effectively communicate a process. Today, I've decided to have another go at this exercise. As I've done this before, I thought it might make it a little more interesting to change the task to making buttered toast. With honey.

For this exercise I will be assuming the aliens have a basic level of understanding. These aliens have been watching earth for a little while and have had the chance to learn English, observe some of the natural world, and have an understanding of numbers and measurements. They probably also know a hell of a lot about the human colon from what the stories claim, but that's neither here nor there.

How to Make Buttered Toast with Honey

This manual will teach you how to make two portions of an earth delicacy known as 'buttered toast with honey'. Buttered toast with honey is a variant of the popular snack 'buttered toast' with the added ingredient of honey. For this task you will require:

• 2 slices of bread (approximately1cm thick). Bread is a type of food commonly made by mixing flour (made from a type of grass called 'wheat'), dried yeast (a type of fungus), and water to make dough which is then baked using a heat source. Bread is commonly baked into a shape that is called a 'loaf' of bread that can be sliced to provide appropriate portions for consumption. NOTE: If you are unable to find slices of bread, you may be required to slice a loaf yourself. This can be difficult, and inadequate knowledge of this process may lead to serious injury. For the purposes of this manual it is recommended you seek assistance in this matter from the nearest human adult.
• 20-30g of butter. Butter is an edible substance made from the milk of large land mammals called cows. Milk that might otherwise be used to feed the cow's young is instead harvested and processed to produce butter.
• 12ml of honey. Honey is a sweet, sticky, edible substance produced by flying insects called 'bees'. Honey is widely harvested from these bees and distributed. WARNING: It is strongly advised that you acquire honey from a source other than the bees themselves. Bees are widely known to be extremely defensive creatures and are almost guaranteed to attack anything that tries to take their honey.
• A toaster. A toaster is an electrical device used to turn slices of bread into toast; and can vary greatly in size, shape, and features. For the purposes of this manual we will be using a British Russell Hobbs 13766 2-Slice Classic Toaster. This will also need to be connected to a 240 V electrical power supply (found inside many permanent and semi-permanent structures).
• A butter knife. A butter knife is a tool used to spread various substances, such as butter and honey, onto the surface of foods, such as bread. The appearance of a butter knife can vary slightly but they are usually 14-20cm long, metal, with a handle at one end and a blunt rounded blade at the other.
• A side plate. A side plate is a small, broad, concave vessel with a diameter of approximately 16 centimetres. This is commonly used to hold small food items, such as toast.

Now that you have all the equipment you need, you can begin to make your toast. Start by placing your 2 slices of bread into the slots in the top of the toaster. The slices should be placed into the slots vertically with the longest edge facing down. This is to ensure that the bread is as fully immersed as possible once the toaster has been activated. If you find that the bread won't fit in this way, you may place it shortest-edge-down into the toaster.

Now you will need to adjust the settings of the toaster to ensure it browns the bread to the required degree. This is a matter of preference but for this tutorial we will be using a browning setting of 4. Turn the largest, cylindrical, knob on the side of the toaster so that the ridge on the side points to the number 4.

Now depress the large flat paddle on the side of the toaster all the way down as far as it will go. Do not force it as this may break the toaster; it should move with firm, gentle pressure. This will lower the bread into the toaster, and begin the toasting process that will transform your bread into toast. If at this point you find that the paddle won't stay depressed, you should check to make sure that the toaster is connected to the power supply, and that the supply is turned on. The toaster should be connected to the power supply using the three pronged plug attached to the toaster by a cable. The power switch should be switched to the ON position which will often be indicated by the word ON displayed on the top of the switch when activated. If ON is not visible on the switch in any configuration, it is most common for the switch to be on when the top is protruding further from the wall than the bottom. WARNING: Do not attempt to insert anything other than the plug into the power supply; this is including (but not limited to): butter knives, fingers, toes, tongues, tentacles, claws, and beaks.

Once the bread has been toasted it will be automatically ejected from the toaster. If the bread begins to burn (indicated by blackening of the bread's surface, followed by smoke) at any time before being ejected, it may be manually ejected by pressing the small, round, black button in the bottom right of the control panel. WARNING: Do not attempt to remove the bread using butter knives, fingers, toes, tongues, tentacles, claws, or beaks whilst the toaster is turned on (the red light is glowing). This could lead to serious injury or even death.

At this point, you may place the 2 pieces of toast flat and adjacent to one another on your side plate. Now place half your butter onto one of the slices of toast and, using the blade of the butter knife, spread the butter evenly across the surface. Using the rest of the butter, repeat the process for the second slice of bread. It is possible to eat your toast in it's current condition, but this particular recipe calls for one last addition.

You can now add your honey. Do this buy pouring half of the honey onto each slice of toast and then spread evenly across the surface using the butter knife as before.

You have successfully produced buttered toast with honey. As a final optional step you can improve your dining experience and the presentation of the the toast by dividing the slices using the butter knife. Below are some examples to get you started.

End

So there you have it; my guide to making buttered toast with honey, for aliens. I am so friggin' hungry now.

Self-Taught Teacher

Having looked at and researched so much recently, I always find it very difficult to pick a subject to write about. My posts so far have been mostly just me passing on the things I’ve read during my research into various subjects and so today I thought I’d break the pattern a little and just talk about some of my own thoughts.

In the past, learning for me has been an uphill struggle. I’m not mentally impaired exactly; but my brain doesn’t make it easy for me or, as I have come to realise in more recent years, conventional teaching methods don’t make it easy for my brain.

In school I was “bright but lazy”, “a daydreamer”, or at worst “disruptive in class”. It wasn’t until I was about 20 years old that a college tutor sent me to see an educational psychiatrist because she was under the impression that I had ADHD. As it turned out, I suffer from an advanced form of “What the s**t did you think sitting me down in a completely sterile environment and talking at me for an hour was going to do?” As you might imagine, the psychiatrist put it slightly differently (those smooth talking shrinks). To be honest, I hadn’t really been told anything I didn’t already know, but it did confirm my suspicions: the modern education system is a joke. So what was I supposed to do? Cry about it? Ask for a free laptop (the standard government compensation/bribe for an inadequate education system)? Or should I just keep doing what I’ve been doing? The only reason I was sent to see an educational psychologist in the first place was that someone had noted my distaste for sitting still and hoping for inspiration to strike from out of the blue. I’m talking about a woman who had her entire fine art class erect plain white cubicles around their desks and completely cut them off from the world that is largely recognised to be the inspiration for about… I’d say every freakin’ piece of art on the planet.

So what did this psychologist tell me? He told me that it was very impressive that I’d managed to get through to doing a foundation degree without losing the plot (I’m not saying he suggested I was mentally unstable by the way). He noted that most people for whom the current education system is unsuited are spotted early as people who appear “bright but lazy”, “a daydreamer”, or sometimes “disruptive in class”. These people are treated as ‘special’ and given a disability allowance by the government (the compensation/bribe I mentioned earlier). He also pointed out that I appeared to have found my own methods for dealing with these inadequacies. It was that comment that got me really thinking. I hadn’t realised it but all those things that were seen as my quirkiness, sense of humour, and creativity, were actually just how I understood the world. For example: Sitting in a lecture one day after hearing the lecturer use the word “pastiche” I turned to my friend and said “Heh, he can’t even say ‘pasties’ properly”. Aside from being a hilarious joke, if I do say so myself, I later came to think of this as an example of how I simply learn things, by twisting them into something funny and memorable.

What I was actually told was that my brain operates in such a way that it needs to have some form of physical reference from which to understand a word. A chair is something solid of which I have personal experience being in physical contact with. Concepts such as love and hate can be referenced to my experiences of them. I know what love feels like because I’ve played Red Dead Redemption, and I know what hate feels like because Jordan has a reality show on ITV. In truth, everyone does this at some level or another and, in fact, it is an extremely effective way of learning; but one that is all but completely missing from the current education system. From that moment on, I decided to make it my ongoing aim to understand everything I could about how my (and everyone else’s) brain works.

I’ve thought for a long time that motivation is the key to learning. A person, properly motivated, can learn anything. Put a gun to a person’s head and I’m sure they’d be pretty obliging, but better than threats, are incentives. If I asked my girlfriend to try and play Halo with me, she might give it a shot, but it wouldn’t be long before she gave up. If I took away here Columbo DVDs and told her we could watch one episode for every deathmatch she won, she would be fraggin’ my ass to hell within 30mins. Having said this, however, it’s my belief that emotions are the real key to motivation. It’s not an original idea by any stretch but an interesting and useful one.

If you think back to your school days, what do you remember most? Can you remember any of your lessons? If so, what part of the lesson do you remember? Do you remember the work you were doing, or something else that was happening? Could it be that the something else was a particularly emotional event, either because it was funny, or annoying, or upsetting? I’ll tell you something I remember; I remember that the particles in a solid object are tightly aligned and rigid. When heated, these particles start to move, initially vibrating and then eventually becoming disconnected from one another. This turns the solid into a liquid. Further heating causes the particles to move more and more, eventually separating completely and evaporating. This is the liquid becoming a gas. I know this is basic stuff, but the reason I remembered it is because of the way it was taught to me. My physics teacher called up half a dozen or so people from the class to come and stand at the front of the room. He lined the “volunteers” up and explained that they represented particles in a solid object. He then set fire to a roll of paper towels and waved it a few feet from the group of assistants, causing them to shuffle uneasily away from him. He explained, as the line began to break down, that they were now becoming a liquid. The teacher then thrust the burning paper into the face of the nearest helper causing him and everyone else in the cluster to completely disperse, demonstrating how a liquid becomes a gas.

I remember certain things from school because they were funny, or exciting or entertaining, not because we were forced to write them down repeatedly. I can’t remember a word of any of my text books, but I could probably quote the entire Back to the Future trilogy. Guess which one I found more entertaining. “Learning isn’t supposed to be entertaining!” No it’s not, it’s supposed to be informative, but can you still call learning informative when people aren’t retaining the information that is being spoon-fed to them?

Ok, so this post is a little disjointed, but it sets us up nicely for future posts, in which I will cover some of the handy little things I’ve discovered about learning, and perphaps more interesting, about teaching.

5S: The Drawer

You may have noticed that my blog posts last week grew increasingly long as the week wore on, so I decided to start your week off with a nice basic overview of one of the methodologies, used in Kaizen: 5S. This methodology doesn’t have to be exclusively linked to Kaizen, but the two are closely related.

5S is basically a tactic for dealing with disorganisation and clutter in the workplace. The aim is to make the work environment a cleaner, safer, and more efficient place in which to operate. 5S is named after the list of five Japanese words that outline the process: seiri(sorting), seiton(stabilise), seiso(shine), seiketsu(standardising), and shitsuke(sustain). It’s has been known for other steps to be added, changing the name to 6S or even 7S, but for the sake of not banging on for umpteen paragraphs, and because I like the simplicity of it, I’ll stick with just the vanilla 5S.

I think a good example to use for this one is ‘The Drawer’; you know the one I mean. I’m talking about that drawer that almost everyone seems to have in their house, where every item that doesn’t really have a place seems to end up. Maybe it has a pair of old glasses without any lenses, or an elegant looking old pen that doesn’t have any ink left but you never get around to buying a refill. Often ‘The Drawer’ will contain dozens of batteries, non of which will work when you need them; or it might contain random lengths of string, blunt scissors, a Scotch Tape roll with no tape on it, or more foreign currency than your local bureau de change. Whatever it contains, you’ll no doubt find yourself regularly rummaging through it trying to find one thing or another and thinking that you really ought to sort it out. Well it’s your lucky day, because 5S is here to help.

Sorting

This stage is about clearing the decks, allowing you to see what space and tools you have. Obsolete items need to be thrown out, and things that may be needed later are put to one side. There are things you need, and things you don’t need. Anything you don’t need or want is out. Get rid of all the old batteries that don’t work; chuck the empty tape roll. Pens with ink stay, pens without ink go; if it’s a case of a pen needing a refill, refill it. Foreign money goes to be changed back into ‘real’ money (there, you just got paid for doing a spring clean).

Stabilising

This stage is about organising and making sure that everything is where it needs to be. This isn’t simply about compartmentalising; it’s also about increasing efficiency. In our drawer example, you could place dividers or install a tray with compartments. You might want to place the pens and pencils on the right-hand side of the drawer so that when you open it, they’re closer to the hand you write with (unless of course you’re left-handed, in which case you’d put them on the left). By doing this you’ll also be able to find the thing you need, when you need it, without having to dig through piles of junk. Remember: A place for everything and everything is its place.

Shine

The workspace should be kept tidy and cleaned down at the end of each shift. All items should be put back in their place. Perhaps not as applicable to the drawer example since you won’t be working in the drawer, but that’s not to say you shouldn’t put that pen back when you’ve finished with it, or get rid of those pencil shavings.

Standardization

In a workplace, there may be many people working at many different workstations, doing the same job. To make it easier for different people to do their job at different stations each one should be standardised. At home you could do this by making sure that any drawer containing pens and pencils has them in the front right corner, ensuring you never have to pause to find where they’ve been stored in that particular drawer.

Sustain

This is simply a case of making sure that things don’t slip back to the way they were. You should also be looking at even more ways to improve efficiency. Perhaps it would shave a few milliseconds off grabbing a pencil if it were placed in the drawer with the tip pointing towards you so it’s ready to write when you pick it up. Or it might be more comfortable to pick up if it were pointing out to the side.

And that’s 5S in a nutshell. Just writing about this stuff gives me OCD induced nervous twitches. Suddenly my whole office looks completely… inefficient. I think it’s pretty easy to see the logic in this stuff and, hopefully, you can see how this relates to the seven wastes I wrote about last week (mostly Motion). A huge amount of time and effort can be saved by following this method, and that’s what I’ll be telling my housemates to their horrified faces when they discover I’ve moved the fridge and my bed into the bathroom.

Six Sigma

You may have struggled to get through my rather lengthy (I didn’t name the blog Hot Air Buffoon for nothing), and technical explanation of the sigma rating system yesterday but I felt it was a relevant bit of background for today’s, less maths-heavy, post.

In the mid 80s Motorola developed a new management strategy designed to elevate all of their production processes to a 6 sigma rating and, through this, six sigma became a term used to describe this management strategy. Since it’s inception the Six Sigma management strategy has been adopted by many companies across the world, including those outside of manufacturing. Companies that have successfully implemented Six Sigma include Amazon.com, Boeing, DELL, Ford, Pepsi, and essentially the entire US armed forces. And those are just the companies that I imagine most people have heard of; there are many more companies with insanely huge outputs that also use Six Sigma. This, however, isn’t to say the system isn’t without its faults.

As I mentioned above, Six Sigma is a management strategy with the aim of achieving a rating of 6 sigma in all of a manufacturer’s processes. This target is achieved through the use of two methods: DMAIC (pronounced duh-may-ick) is designed for improving current processes, and DMADV (pronounced duh-mad-vee) also sometimes referred to as Design For Six Sigma or DFSS (not to be confused with the furniture retailer) which is used to create new processes. Here is a fairly quick breakdown of DMAIC and DMADV, using the old toast example

DMADV stands for Define, Measure, Analyse, Design, and Verify; which, funnily enough, are also the five steps involved in the method. Rememeber: this is the method used to create new processes.

The first step is to specifically Define all aspects of the process such as the customer's requirements, and the project boundaries. This is a little like when my picky little princess asks me to make her some toast before work in the morning and tells me she wants it well toasted (not burnt) with just a very thin layer of butter (because she doesn’t want to get fat), and for it to be warm, with the butter all lovely and melted (because she’s a fussy little git). And she needs it quick because her train is at eight fifteen. From this I have a well defined specification and timeframe in which to produce the product.

The second step is to accurately Measure the customer’s needs and specifications. This would be where I ask her highness exactly how hot she’d like her toast to be, how much butter she would like, and how quickly she needs it.

The third step is to Analyse the different options for the production stage. Should I try and eyeball the butter for the sake of speed or should I use something to measure it precisely. Should I put the bread into the toaster on a medium setting, or blast it with the blowtorch from the shed.

The fourth step is to Design the process to meet the customer’s needs. So it’s a blast with the blowtorch to get the toast to the required forty five degrees Celsius followed by three grams of butter, which has been weighed out on the scales, thinly spread over the top.

The fifth and final step is to Verify the process. Hmm, it only took me thirty seconds to do this toast but it tastes a little too paraffiny, and footy. The bathroom scale may be sensitive but isn’t hugely accurate, or beneficial to the overall flavour. The blowtorch could need rethinking too. I think we need to move on to DMAIC

DMAIC stands for Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, and Control; and is used to improve current processes.

The first step is to specifically Define all aspects of the process such as the customers requirements, and the project boundaries. This would be: hot toast at fourty five degrees Celsius, with three grams of melted butter, in three minutes.

The second step is to accurately Measure all the key aspects of the process and collect any relevant data. Given time, the process I’d use to produce toast for her highness could be monitored and I would make detailed notes on things such as the performance of the blowtorch in getting the toast to the correct toastyness, the accuracy of the scale, time taken, and so on.

The third step is to Analyse the data collected and determine the primary causes of any defects as well as identify areas for improvement. I might be burning the toast a bit and the amounts of butter might be a little inconsistent.

The fourth step is to Improve the process by finding ways to fix or prevent problems. Perhaps I could buy some kitchen scales to measure the exact amount of butter, or just use the toaster to stop burning the toast. It might take longer but, as long as it toasts in less than three minutes, we’re still ok.

The fifth and final step is to Control the improvements and make sure that the new process is maintained. In other words, keep using the toaster and don’t do stupid things like weighing food on the bathroom scales. After a bit of faffing around, my little bunnykins might even stop hitting me for trying to feed her blowtorched toast.

So that’s a quick rundown of the basic Six Sigma method, but I did say it has its faults. Some people claim that Six Sigma has negative effects such as stifling creativity and limiting the levels of innovation within a company. Another feature of Six Sigma is that it creates a hierarchy of roles based on martial arts rankings, with green belts and black belts being examples of terms used to describe people at different levels of Six Sigma proficiency within a company. The use of black belts as consultants travelling to different companies has aided the growth of training and certification, leading some people to claim that many consulting firms will oversell Six Sigma as an area of expertise for them when they only really have a basic understanding of the process.

Perhaps the biggest question about Six Sigma comes from its primary aim of achieving a process quality rank of 6 sigma. It may be ok for some processes to produce 3.4 defects per million opportunities, it might not make sense for others. Only 3.4 out of a million laptops failing might be great but would you want to be on a life support machine with the same chance of defect. It is also accepted that the quality of a process will deteriorate over time and so a sigma shift of 1.5 over time is considered acceptable. This means that a process with a long term sigma rating of 4.5 could still count as a 6 sigma process. That life support machine isn’t looking so life supporting now is it.

Well, I have once again managed to skip though a fairly deep subject with reckless abandon, and now I must compose some kind of dry and witty remark with which to sign off.

Bye!

The Sigma Rating System

Despite what this highly informative entry on Urban Dictionary might have you believe, the sigma rating system is not a way of rating the relative attractiveness of another person, but a way of rating the quality of a manufacturing process. The sigma rating system is based on the idea that the number of defects that could potentially occur in a production process is statistically predictable. That means that by observing the number of times, and how severely someone botches the production of an item during a relatively short sample period; you can predict how many, out of a million units, he’s going to totally bugger up.

The sigma scale ranges from one to six. 1 sigma is at the bottom of the scale with about 69%, or 687,672 units per million, of units produced being defective. This is probably about equivalent to a Tesco shopping bag which, roughly seven times out of ten, will fail to hold the wait of your shopping, causing it to liberate its contents all over the pavement. In contrast, six sigma signifies a DPMO (defects per million opportunities) of 3.4, which I have kindly illustrated below.

Every white pixel in this image represents non-defective output, and every black pixel represents defective output. You might need to click on the image and enlarge it to see the black pixels.

Assuming you understand what I’ve said so far, you might be wondering how they come up with this figure; it’s not as if a manufacturer can just do something a million times and then count the how often they balls it up. This is where the maths comes in. I wouldn’t normally bore you with this level of detail, but the graphs I found whilst researching this stuff were so mesmerising I just had to find out what they meant, and after a good few hours trying to get my head around it, I think I’ve earned the right to try and explain it to you.

Let’s say you want to go into manufacturing cups of tea from your kitchen. God knows why you’d want to do that but for the sake of argument let’s say I’ve come to visit with my chai chugging girlfriend. She needs a constant supply of tea, and you need to supply it. She’s fussy about her tea but more than that, she doesn’t want to have to wait around all day to get it since she must drink them at a rate of about one every ten minutes (yeah, this is what I have to deal with). So you need to be producing tea at a set rate to a fairly specific standard. For this example we’ll use the amount of milk in the tea as the thing being measured. We’ll say that Tea Monster likes roughly 50ml of milk in her tea. Since it wouldn’t make much difference to be a few ml over or under, we’ll assume a buffer of about 3ml over or under 50ml; these are our upper and lower specification limits (USL, LSL). If, after closely monitoring the amount of milk being put into each cup of tea for a while, you find that the amount of milk being added is at a fairly consistent and predictable standard, we could make a good estimate of the mean amount of milk used, and the standard deviation from that amount. Put simply: add up the total amount of milk used so far and divide it by the number up cups of tea made (this is the mean); then work out how much, on average, you go over or under that amount (this is the standard deviation). Let’s pretend that these work out as 49.4ml for the mean and 0.5ml for the standard deviation. At this point, you can imagine a scale stretching between your upper and lower specification limits, with a range of -6 to 6. The middle of this scale is what you’re aiming for, a distance of six sigma from either specification limit. Check out this graph for where we’re up to.

OK, so it’s a little squiffy but what you should be able to see on the graph is this:

• The black scale along the bottom represents the amount of milk in the tea ranging from 47ml to 53ml, and is divided up into twelve levels; six above the target 50ml and six below.
• The green line in the middle represents our target mean, the 50ml we want to be putting into each cup of tea.
• The red lines either side are our upper and lower specification limits of 47ml and 53ml of milk.
• The blue curve represents the measurements taken so far with the mean being at the peak of this line.

In this graph you can see that the largest amount of measurements (the peak of the blue line) is in the dead centre of the scale at 0, and drops off at about 3.5 points from the centre. This means that on average the cups of tea are getting 50ml of milk each with roughly a 3.5 point margin of error on each side. On this particular scale 1 point is about half an ml of milk. The maths all gets very complex here and there are certain formulas to work out the specific values, but basically this graph is translated into what is called a process capability index, with measurements of Cp and Cpk. A six sigma rating requires a Cp of 2 and a Cpk of 1.5 so with a bit of quick mathalizing, I can work out work out the sigma rating of our tea production process using the mean of 49.4ml and the standard deviation of 0.5ml. Check out my working below.

Assuming these chicken scratchings are correct, we can see that we have a Cp of 2 and a Cpk of 1.6. We could push our standard deviation to .75ml and it would still be a six sigma process as this would only change the Cpk to 1.5, which is within the formal definition of six sigma.

So there you have it, a rather thorough run-down of the sigma rating system. You might be wondering why stop at six sigma? Why not keep pushing and go to seven or eight sigma (whatever that would be)? Why not aim to eliminate all defects completely? Well those are very good questions that I will have to cover in a future blog post, but for now, I’m going to go and do something very dumb to make up for all the smart stuff I’ve just offloaded. Maybe I’ll stick a fork in the toaster.

Sinbad and The Seven Wastes

Following on from yesterday’s post, briefly explaining the concepts of continuous improvement processes and Kaizen, I feel I should expand on a few things. As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been doing a lot of research into various subjects and, as you might imagine, it’s a lot to remember. Yesterday’s post was a very short explanation of Kaizen and so today I’d like to test my memory by discussing what I can remember of… The Seven Wastes (to be said in the most dramatic voice you can muster). In Kaizen, or Lean, or TPS, or any of that jazz, actions can be split into two groups: things that add value, and things that don’t add value. The latter can be summed up using what are referred to as the seven wastes. I now present, for your reading pleasure, my summary of… The Seven Wastes (go on, do the voice).

Transport

Transport is the first waste. This is any needless conveyance of objects; for example: when a manufacturer has a warehouse to store the raw materials needed for production. This means that materials need to be transported from the supplier to the warehouse, and then from the warehouse to the factory, rather than transporting the raw materials directly from the supplier to the factory. On a smaller scale, it’s a bit like buying a massive load of house supplies and putting them in the garden shed until you’ve used up the stuff in the house, and then moving it all from the shed to the fridge and cupboards. ‘But manufacturers need to keep a large stockpile of raw materials ready to turn into a finished product; they can’t keep it all on-site.’ I hear you cry. Well, read on.

Inventory

Inventory is the second waste and refers to the unnecessary stockpiling of things such as raw materials. On a large scale, the warehouse mentioned in the previous paragraph is a good example. Raw materials should be coming into the factory as and when they are required for production. A smaller scale example would be where a factory worker takes a handful of bolts and puts them down next to him, when he only needs one at that particular time. By pulling out a handful of bolts, he’s just cluttering his area with needless crap that would get in the way and potentially damage whatever he’s working on. At home this would be like making a pile of toast by first tipping the entire sliced loaf all over the kitchen counter. The bread would be in the way when you wanted to take the toast out and butter it, and it would get pushed around, break apart, and generally pick up crap from the kitchen top. And no one wants to eat an entire loaf’s worth of toast after it’s been used to clean the kitchen.

Motion

Motion is the third waste and relates to any extraneous movements required to get the job done. An example of this would be if a factory worker had to walk ten feet to a draw of bolts every time he needed one (in that case he could be excused for taking a handful with him) instead of simply having a supply of bolts at his workstation when he needed them. At home this is like keeping a supply of tea bags in the cupboard on the other side of the kitchen instead of in a jar next to the kettle. In manufacturing, this can be taken to even greater extremes such as when drilling a row of holes. In this case, when moving the drill from one hole to the next, a worker/machine may be trained/programmed to only pull the drill far enough away from the material to allow it to be moved to the next drill point, rather than lifting the drill completely off the surface and replacing it at the next drill point.

Waiting

Waiting is the fourth waste, and is fairly self explanatory. Time is money, and you don’t want people sitting around waiting for tools or materials. You also don’t want machines sitting around doing nothing while people potter around preparing the next batch of whatever to go through. How often do you just sit and watch the toaster toasting or the kettle boiling? If your answer is “All the time” or even “Occasionally”, then I’m sorry to say it, but Kaizen thinks you’re a bum.

Overproduction

Overproduction is the fifth waste, and is again fairly self explanatory. If someone asks a manufacturer for 50 cars, and the manufacturer makes 100 cars, they might be able to sell the extra 50 cars to someone else but ultimately it’s a waste of time, money, and resources. At the very least, the manufacturer would need to find a place to store the cars which takes us back to inventory waste. If your wife, girlfriend, houseguest or whoever asks for a cup of tea, you don’t go and make five, then come back and say “I’ve made a few more there if you want them.” You’d get a funny look to say the least.

Over-processing

Over-processing is the sixth waste and refers to any action beyond that which is required by the client. Something like taking the time to polish every little nut and bolt inside an engine to a high shine would be over production; it fails to add value for the end customer because most customers will never see the inside of the engine. Obviously cleaning the components to the point at which they can do their job is important, but no more than that. It would be like measuring the precise amount of water and milk that you put into a cup of tea, making sure it’s at exactly the right temperature, then weighing the sugar and gently stirring it in to then be carefully transported to the plumber who will down it and hand you a bill of £50 for looking at your broken shower and saying “I’ll have to order a part from Mars and then come back and renovate your bathroom for a month.” Plumbers don’t deserve your tea; give them hot dishwater and milk.

Defects

Defects are the seventh and final waste. Defects basically refer to any time someone messes up the product they’re working on, and it has to be repaired or even scrapped and production started from scratch. This would be like when Bobby Spam Hands manages to drill a hole the size of a grapefruit through the fuselage of a plane only to find that the half inch bolt it was intended for seems to “move around a bit” in the hole.

So there you have it; the seven wastes in seven delicious bite-sized paragraphs. You may notice I’ve highlighted the first letter of each waste, and the more observant of you will possibly have realised they spell out TIM WOOD, a handy little mnemonic if I do say so myself. As my girlfriend quite diligently queried, after reading my notes on the whiteboard in my office; who is TIM WOOD? I don’t know. Who’s ROY G BIV? I hope it has been as educational for you to read as it was for me to write, and even more entertaining.

Kaizen: An Introduction

As my girlfriend would no doubt tell you, I always find it easier to learn things by trying to teach them to other people (just ask her about neodymium magnets, how 3D TV works, or pretty much anything to do with PCs if you don’t believe me). So with that in mind, I’ve decided to write a brief post on just one of the things I’ve been researching over the past couple of weeks. Hopefully it’ll be informative and, if possible, entertaining, but I’m not making any promises. At the very least, my girlfriend will be spared the lectures and allowed to fill her brain with things she really cares about, like ‘everything there is to know about Columbo’.

I was recently asked if I knew what Kaizen was. While I recognised the word I wasn’t familiar enough with it to supply a definition, so when I got home later that day I decided to look it up.

The term Kaizen means 'change for the better', and comes from the Japanese kai; meaning change, and zen; meaning good. Kaizen is a form of continuous improvement process. A continuous improvement process, or CIP, is the process of improving a product, service or process through constant repeated iteration. It’s a bit like at home, if you ever cook the same recipe on a regular basis you might find that you make small improvements to it every so often, adding a little salt or trying slightly different vegetables. You might also find that you find ways to cut down on the preparation time by preparing some things while others cook, or saving on washing up by cooking everything in one pan instead of two or three. By tweaking the different variables, you can improve the efficiency of the process(cooking) and the quality of the final product (food). The basic process of CIP is looking at what you’re doing and then identifying, reducing, and removing any action that negatively impacts the product, process, or service. The other key thing to remember is that CIP is about constant tiny steps rather than giant alterations.

Kaizen appears to be a very popular and effective form of continuous improvement process and is recognised as a key factor in the success of many Japanese and American companies, most notably Toyota, who developed their own Toyota Production System (TPS) based on Kaizen. Kaizen and TPS are also related to ‘lean manufacturing’ which basically sees anything that doesn’t add value for the end customer (the person buying the service/finished product) to be a waste. There is so much more detail I could go into, but for the sake of brevity, I'll leave that for future posts.

I love all this because, despite what many people might think about me, I can be a bit of a perfectionist and a pedant. Unfortunately, I can also be quite lazy, and although I never compromise on quality, I’m always looking to find more efficient ways to do things. Without wanting to turn into some kind of OCD robot, I’ve already started to find myself looking at ways I can implement ideas from Kaizen and Lean in my everyday work and home life. I’m walking a fine line now, but I don’t think it’s too ridiculous to move the teabags, kettle, and mugs to the same part of the kitchen, do you? Only time will tell just what effect this has on me but it seems to have worked for others so far, so I’m not worried, just as long as my housemates remember to put the cheese grater back on the shadow board.