The urban legend of the clown statue is repeated more frequently as the Halloween season approaches. The next time you hear it, now you can apply it to Six Sigma.
The tale of the clown statue tells of a teenage girl who accepted a babysitting job for an evening. Before leaving, the father set down the ground rules and asked that after she put the children to bed that she stay in the bedroom to be close to the children. The children had been having nightmares and he wanted the babysitter to be close by to comfort them if they awoke in the night.
After the usual evening routine she said goodnight to the children and put them to bed. As instructed the girl stayed in the bedroom to spend the rest of the evening.
When the babysitter turned on the light in the bedroom, she was startled to see a life-size statue of a clown in the corner. Although she found the statue strange and a little alarming, she remembered the father’s instructions, and she decided to stay in the room.
She sat down on the bed to watch TV and deliberately put the statue just outside her line of sight. But as she watched TV, her attention was drawn to the clown statue in the corner. The clown seemed to be watching her, and out of the corner of her eye she thought she saw the statue move.
The babysitter became increasingly unsettled by the clown statue. She wanted to leave the bedroom but had been told not to. Uncertain what to do, she went downstairs and called the children’s parents.
“Sorry to bother you,” she said “but would you mind if I moved the clown statue in the bedroom? Or at least put a blanket over it? It’s starting to weird me out.”
“What are you talking about?” he asked. “We don’t have a clown statue. Take the children and get out of the house,” he said with a tone of alarm in his voice.
The girl grabbed the children and ran to the next door neighbor’s house. Once she was safely inside, she looked out to see the curtain of the bedroom window pulled back and the flickering light from the TV screen illuminating the face of the clown.
When the police arrived, they found the babysitter had reason to be terrified: the clown was an escapee from a local mental asylum. He had been hiding in the family’s attic from where he emerged at night to visit the children’s room, which was causing their “nightmares.” He wouldn’t tell the police why he was dressed as a clown or why he had been lingering in the house. The only clue to his intentions was the large butcher knife he was carrying.
Variance Is the Psychotic Clown
Variance in a Six Sigma production process is as unwelcome as a psychotic clown in our home. In the early phases of a Six Sigma project we may be like the babysitter; we suspect there is something dangerous lurking in the shadows of the process. However, we can’t describe what it is, and we don’t know how concerned we should be.
The measure phase of the DMAIC process gives project teams the tools they need to graphically display the variation of the process’ output:
Histograms – Help determine if the process is capable of meeting customer requirements. This tool displays all data points in a sample in a series of abutted bars. It provides a quick glimpse of the data’s distribution and the amount of variance in the process.
Pareto Chart – This chart allows project teams to focus their attention on problems with the greatest potential for improvement. The problem categories are arranged by frequency or cost and the category with the highest occurrence is targeted first.
Run Chart – This tool allows project teams to observe the trends and patterns in a process’s performance over time.
Variance puts your ability to meet your customer’s needs in grave danger. Don’t allow it to prowl unnoticed in the background waiting for its moment to strike. Use the tools of the Measure phase of Six Sigma to help reveal the psychotic clowns so that they may be eliminated.
