Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: If there was one word to describe your experience and history with Shannon, what would it be?
[00:00:08] Speaker B: One word I think is mind blowing. Two words or one?
[00:00:11] Speaker A: One. Well, you can, you can put those a dash in between them.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: Yeah. And the reason why I'm saying that is like my first project took a year to do and it really was like a weak project if that. It was so such simple project, but it clicked all of a sudden. My whole world got flipped upside down.
Philips came in and corporate mandated. We all go through Six Sigma training and now here I am working with these 14 engineers that are really good chain and problem solvers. And we were just really upset because we were getting pushed to do go X to Y when we just had some crazy success going Y to X. But our red X master came in and said it's easy peasy. I will show you how to fit the chaining tools into the lean Six Sigma structure and you can utilize them.
Welcome to why they Fail, the podcast.
[00:01:02] Speaker C: That pulls back the curtain on why.
[00:01:04] Speaker B: Continuous improvement efforts fail. Buckle up because we're not here for motivational fluff. We're dissecting the short sighted decisions and.
[00:01:13] Speaker C: Leadership agendas that sabotage CI success.
[00:01:17] Speaker B: But don't worry, we'll clue you in to the few simple keys to success to avoid these pitfalls. If you're ready for for the truth, let's do this.
[00:01:32] Speaker C: Welcome to why they Fail, the podcast that explores the world of continuous improvement. I'm your host, Kevin Clay.
Today we're diving deep into a powerful yet surprisingly little known methodology that was actually a precursor to Six Sigma. Have you ever heard of Shannon? My guest today, Brian St. Pierre, is an Expert with over 25 years of experience in this unique approach to problem solving.
He was introduced to Shannon Red X problem solving early in his career and found it so game changing, it completely flipped his understanding of the process.
We're going to explore what Shannon is, how it was secretly the backbone of Motorola's famous quality revolution and its incredible role in, in ensuring the reliability of the Apollo lunar module.
Stick around as we compare Shannon directly to Lean Six Sigma to find out what makes it so effective for the world's toughest technical problems.
[00:02:35] Speaker A: Okay, we have Brian St Pierre here today to talk to us a little bit about his history in Lean Six Sigma and his history in methodology called Shannon. Shannon was, I, I've come to find out a precursor to Six Sigma. We, we met for dinner one day. We live in the same area and he, he told me about this methodology called Shannon and, and kind of the background behind it. So without further ado, Brian, tell us a little bit about yourself and tell us a little bit about this Shannon methodology that we had a pretty long discussion about.
[00:03:19] Speaker B: My name is Brian St. Pierre. I work for Philips Medical Systems and I was introduced to a methodology called chain and red X problem solving God 25 years ago. And you know, basically was straight out of college grad school, knew everything and was complete and total skeptic.
So I wasn't the best student. Took me a year to do my first project and like something just happened that flipped me upside down. Like everything I learned about problem solving from day zero to current was all wrong. And chain and really if you asked me what I'd be doing 25 years later, Chainin would not even have been on the list. But found a real passion for it. And you know, I don't know if it's just dumb luck or the way things work out, but I wound up working very closely with Dick Shannon at GE and traveled all over the world with him teaching GE engineers and production people how to solve the toughest technical problems and was part of a small group that were called in when, when crap really hit the fan and they needed some very quick problem solving done. And we were 100% successful in every case. And very quickly where, you know, we work with great engineers at TE & Philips and they were stopped for months and years in some cases.
[00:04:43] Speaker A: Give me, give me some examples of some problems that you have addressed with Shane.
[00:04:49] Speaker B: Okay. So I try not to give any specific customer product related things out but I've worked on pipelines that are 10 miles long, 12 inches in diameter. Exploding.
[00:05:03] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:05:04] Speaker B: I've worked on some parts of the F35 and I've worked anything from like kilometer long pipes, valves the size of this room, subsea valves and down to the nanometer scale on semiconductor chips. So I've been really fortunate between both companies that I worked for that I got so much experience in such a diverse product line which, which comes up often when we do problem solving machine is how can you possibly help us? You know nothing about this product, right? You really don't need to know anything about the product. They have the experts that know about the product. You just need to know problem solving strategy.
[00:05:42] Speaker A: Okay, excellent. So how did you, how did you get into Shannon? How did you get into this?
[00:05:47] Speaker B: Super Dumb luck.
Dumb dumb luck. I got graduated from grad school, was hanging around Penn State University out of dumb luck. Phillips has a plant about 45 minutes away and I was hired at the same time they were kicking off this new thing called Shannon. And Philips did have an internal program for Shannon teaching and coaching problems. So I just. It's just the timing. Just dumb luck, really.
[00:06:13] Speaker A: Okay. And was Shannon before Six Sigma? You know, that's kind of a buzzword now. We follow this methodology called Lean and Six Sigma. But you told me that the precursor was some other methodologies like Shannon.
[00:06:32] Speaker B: Yeah. So I know some of the history about it, what I've been told, and I will communicate what I've been told. So I don't know how much of this is urban legend or whether or.
[00:06:42] Speaker A: Not this is right.
[00:06:44] Speaker B: So Six Sigma came from Motorola's work in the 90s, where they were trying to compete in a very competitive market and their quality levels needed to be on par or better than the competitors. And we all know that whole journey they got to Six Sigma quality levels and they did something very important. They won the Malcolm Baltich Award.
And part of the process of winning that award is they have to communicate to other companies how they achieved what they did.
And part of that, and it's probably one of. I think it's one of the only publications of parts and bits and pieces of the Shane and methodology was they had to basically tell how they got there.
You've never heard of Shannon. Most people have never heard of Shannon. And we can talk about that a little bit because you should know that word. Every American should know that word because he's done some amazing things that we'll get into in a little bit with quality and problem solving. So the way I understand it is that Motorola couldn't really tell exactly what they did, so they came up with Lean Six Sigma and Lean Six Sigma. Now, the structures are very similar. They have like the same key things, but the attack is completely backwards. What's really interesting about it is my, I think my second Shannon class that we taught at ge, one of the guys in the class pulled me over in one of the breaks and he's like, hey. He's like, I want to show you this.
He said, I used to work for motorola in the 1980s and this is my training book. And he opened the book up and it was a lot of shaning material.
[00:08:12] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:08:13] Speaker B: Yeah.
So I don't know how much of all this is urban legend, but I do know that Dorian Shannon, who came up with the Shannon Reddick's methodology and founded the consulting group Shannon, he worked for Motorola in the 1980s. And if you read the book World Class Quality by Keke Bodhi and Keke Bodhi's pretty direct at saying without Shannon we wouldn't have solved the single quality problem.
[00:08:37] Speaker A: Six Sigma has progressed over, you know, since the mid-80s. How did that get in the way of Shannon gaining that, that renown?
[00:08:47] Speaker B: Yeah, so Shannon is really not well known and that's primarily because of the IP control they have on their product. So when you take the class you have to sign a licensing agreement and you're not allowed to teach it, you're not allowed to use it outside the company that you've signed the agreement with. So. And they are very careful with their ip, which rightly so, if you take the class and have the opportunity to get exposed to it, some really cool stuff, it really is a game changer, you know. And I know when Shannon comes out and they, they do their pitches to different companies, right. I mean it's different. One has to be very careful tiptoeing around the Six Sigma stuff because really only thing that people have heard is Lean Six Sigma. They haven't really heard of Shannon.
Now if you're in the automotive industry, it's somewhat well known in the automotive industry. Shannon's really big in automotive and defense.
So that's why you haven't heard of it. It's, it's. They don't teach it in school.
[00:09:42] Speaker A: I think with Six Sigma that there comes certifications and can you get certified in Shannon?
[00:09:48] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And I don't know what came first, the Six Sigma certifications or the Shannon certifications. So I, that's law history. I don't know about.
Shannon has many different levels. The first one is apprentice and for apprentice certification you need to complete a project and has to be reviewed by Shane and you have to take the class obviously. Right. It's pretty easy. There's usually two people on a team. One person a leader, another person, team member. They keep the teams extremely small. And that's because through the history of doing this and even I've noticed if you have a bigger team, usually there's one person driving it, maybe two, really doing all the work and the other people are just participating.
We will call in people as needed. Like we need an expert in this. We'll bring people in for sure. But it's really just a compact two person team.
Now journeyman certification is a whole different ball game.
So in journeyman certification you have to be the team leader on a project. You have to take the advanced class, the journeyman class. And after that there's a very comprehensive online test.
And after you pass the online test there is actually an oral examination, and it's pretty grueling. You really need to know your stuff when you're at that level. My students, I grill the heck out of my prep, the heck out of them when they take this test. They normally walk out if they're not 90% on the online exam. Most of my students get 95 or a hundred on the test.
[00:11:19] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:11:20] Speaker B: It's not a hard test if you know your stuff.
[00:11:23] Speaker A: If you were to compare and contrast Lean Six Sigmo or Six Sigma and chaining, what. What would be the differentiators between the two?
[00:11:35] Speaker B: Yeah. So I am also a black belt certified at so in Lean Six Sigma. So I've done both. But I find that there's different ways to be certified as green belt or black belt. And there's also, like, there's yellow belt, but I never had that at ge. We never had that stuff.
And then there's mbb. So my experience at ge, the, the black belt level is very comprehensive. It's not just Six Sigma projects. It's these continuous improvement classes you have to take and you have to coach. I can't remember the numbers, but it's like you have to do like three or four projects, and they have to be a different type mix of projects.
[00:12:13] Speaker A: Pretty comprehensive at ge.
[00:12:16] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:12:16] Speaker A: Yes. And Six Sigma certification over time has been really kind of watered down.
[00:12:23] Speaker B: Yeah. And that's something.
[00:12:24] Speaker A: We can get a green belt and to get a certification.
And unfortunately, that that's somewhat been a detractor for people getting into Six Sigmas. It's funny, I was talking to another one of my guests, Mike Carnell, and he's was talking about how in. In Six Sigma, the emphasis now is certifications. It's not on solving problems. Right. So people just want to have certifications with their. In their company, have people certified. And it's. It's amazing to me, we. We deal with a.
And they just want certifications. And then after we certify somebody first time for they've finished a project, they don't go on and do another project. So they. They've lost the biggest, the big, biggest benefit of any kind of continuous improvement methodology, and that's having people continuously improve.
[00:13:20] Speaker B: Now, even at ge, it was used as a stepping stone for a career path, which is fine.
But I think there's a certain subset which we argued for in my group, that, you know, if you're a black belt, you should have to be staying in that role for another year and just knocking out projects because it takes a long time. Even with Shannon, even My journeyman. They're not ready to go out on their own and start solving problems. They're. We call consciously competent. They know what to do. They have to think about a lot of what they need to do.
Whereas when you get your master certification, which is the next level up in Shannon, and which is really tough, I mean, you've got a lot of work to do as a master, you know, you have to be able to sit in a room and you're not even like, I don't think about what the next steps are in a project. It's just, it just happened. It's like, okay, we've done this, we're doing that a lot of times. We don't even have time to write it down.
[00:14:12] Speaker A: In Shannon, is. Is there a formal roadmap or is it more of a cognitive roadmap?
[00:14:17] Speaker B: No, no, it's a formal. In terms of problem solving or in terms of.
Yeah, the problem solving.
[00:14:23] Speaker A: Terms of problem solving. And are there different milestones to that roadmap? You know, in, in Six Sigma, there's the D. Right. P, Lean pdca. So is, Is there a roadmap specifically?
[00:14:36] Speaker B: Yeah, and Shannon calls it factual.
Okay, so there's like focus approach. Oh, God. Convergence test and understand, apply and leverage.
[00:14:48] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:14:49] Speaker B: So it's a very comprehensive, structured approach. And there's like, Shannon uses these. I, I gotta be careful. I can't say a lot of stuff because there's IP on it. And I actually had to talk with Shannon before I met you, and I'm like, can I say this? Can I say that? But, but I will say that they are very open to being on your podcast if there's an interest. I talked to Craig, who's Kaisan, who's the president of Shane, and said he would absolutely come in and give you an introduction.
[00:15:12] Speaker A: That's what intrigued me when I talked to you. I, I'm. I have gone on a journey now to really understand chaining and the red X.
It's just a toolbox, right? Whatever you want. It just means you have a bigger toolbox. It's absolutely problems.
[00:15:30] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:15:31] Speaker A: And I'm so glad that there is, there is a roadmap, because without a roadmap, I, I tend to find that we have variation in the way that we solve problems. Right.
[00:15:41] Speaker B: That Shannon was the guy that did all the reliability on the lunar module for the Apollo.
[00:15:47] Speaker A: Yes, you told me about that. Tell us that story.
[00:15:49] Speaker B: He did work on the lunar module and he won that contract because of the reliability, statistical confidence that he could give NASA on The reliability of a lunar module. And it did its job right in Apollo 13. It became a life raft. It was stressed beyond all the stresses that you could imagine or didn't even imagine. And Dorian's work on that really played a key role in getting the astronauts back because he had overstressed that lunar modulus in so many different ways that they couldn't break it.
[00:16:25] Speaker A: Wow.
Well, we've heard a lot in history about the lunar module, but I didn't put Dorian in that story.
[00:16:35] Speaker B: Yeah. So you go on to the American Society of Quality. The highest award that they issue is the Dorian Award. The Dorian chain in award. So why hasn't the rest of the world heard about this?
It's actually a shame for me. I'm like, oh, why isn't everyone doing Shannon? But I will tell you that like I can go into a company and, or I can have talks, talk with people. And as soon as I say the word Shannon, people's eyes roll like, I'm not, this is the new thing. Like, I'm not going to do this.
[00:17:06] Speaker A: Let's, let's do this. Because I've got listeners out there that still really don't know what Shannon is.
[00:17:12] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:17:13] Speaker A: And I know there, there's some, some proprietary rights, but if you are just, just on a basic level, help people to understand what this, this awesome methodology is as compared to Lean or Six Sigma. You know, the people, a lot of people know Lean because it's, it's tangible thing. You can touch it and feel it. Although it doesn't really deal with stats, which I have. I think it's kind of funny that most people morph towards Lean because they don't like the statistical rigor of Six Sigma. Right. And that's probably the same thing with, with Shane. And so give us a little, you know, a comparison contrast about these different methodologies and how you can pick Shannon.
[00:17:59] Speaker B: Yeah. So I guess first and foremost is Shannon is not something you can apply to every problem that a business has.
[00:18:05] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:18:06] Speaker B: It's power is really in technical problem solving. So technical scrap work, warranty.
Lean is not the tool for that. Lean is, is like process flows and waste and processes. And that's great tool. Like it's perfect. But it's not the power tool that you need to use for technical problem solving. It's also for problem solving with hidden root causes.
So if things are obvious, so your light bulb is out in your house, like you're going to go change the light bulb. Right. It's the experience based approach. It's the most efficient way to problem solve. And when things get really tough and we've come up with these structured base approach, lean Six Sigma, a Shannon, but Shannon is, is, is something that is really, really powerful. And, and here's how the way it works. Dorian Shannon realized very early in his career that there's really, even though there could be a million X's that drive the variation in the process, there's one primary driver.
And if you look at the Pareto concept, if you knock out the top totem pole on that Pareto, you knock out most of the variation in the process.
So it has to do with the square root of sum of squares theory. And you can't add individual standard deviations up. You have to square them and then add them together and take the square root. So if you knock out the biggest issue, you have the biggest impact to the overall variation. And on top of that, it's much easier to find what we call the red X than it is to find the other X's, which Shannon refers to as the pink X and pale pink X and the pale, pale pink X.
In Six Sigma world, we're trying to create this giant transfer function and understand everything. But what Shannon realized was, who cares? Like, you knock out the red X, you may never have to worry about any of those things at all.
Now, in a very small, in my experience, I can name like three projects where I had a pink X that was in equal magnitude as my red X, but I couldn't find my pink X until I knocked out the red X. And then, oh, that's why this other stuff is happening.
[00:20:17] Speaker A: To me. It sounds like, like what, what we believed in Six Sigma, especially the Pareto concept. I, I deal with companies and, and I didn't mean to interrupt you, but when I heard the Pareto concept, that that's the most underutilized tool, I think, ever.
[00:20:36] Speaker B: Yeah. So Shannon's on the Pareto concept.
[00:20:39] Speaker A: Yeah, I go, I go to so many companies and they, they want to solve all the problems.
And I say that's that it's useless. You're never going to do it. You got to get down to using something that, like the prototart or a prioritization tool. Get down to the thing that you really value. Right. And then when you're in that project, get down to that one thing you can really manage to fix. And I think you're calling it the red X. Right.
[00:21:08] Speaker B: The red X is the factor which has the biggest impact, which is what's really interesting is that the other part of this is where it differs from six sigma and any other traditional problem solving is in lean six sigma. And all our problem solving, we go X to Y, we get our experts in the room and they go through what they think is causing the issues. If you look at the results of a fishbone diagram, what's the worst thing that can happen on a fishbone?
[00:21:33] Speaker A: I always find the fishbone diagram. They always go back to training. And I actually don't use fishbones or five wise or any of that. I use data. Data. That's the only way I solve a problem. So data is how I Pareto and get down to the statistically significant problems, the things that show up in the data.
So I think I'm correlating that to your red X. I believe that in Shannon that you find the red X some other ways along with so. And I'm.
[00:22:06] Speaker B: We'll talk about that in a second.
[00:22:08] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:22:09] Speaker B: So the worst thing that you can have in a brainstorming type approach is that the root cause is not on your fishbowl.
[00:22:16] Speaker A: Oh, right. Yes.
[00:22:17] Speaker B: And look how much time and energy and resources you waste, which are your most valuable things in a company. Right.
Kanan works backwards. We start with the why, we start with the defect, and we work backwards to use clues in the way the defect is manifest itself to find out what is actually driving it. And they use something called a progressive search.
So if you don't understand a progressive search, I have a deck of cards here.
[00:22:46] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:22:46] Speaker B: Okay. It's a real deck of cards. It's not, not a fake one. I'm just going to pull a card out of here. All right. Make sure I know what it is.
All right.
You have to ask me questions on what to answer. What card is in here?
I can only answer that with yes or no.
[00:23:04] Speaker A: Okay.
All right. So if I was to ask you, is it a heart?
[00:23:10] Speaker B: I would say yes.
[00:23:11] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:23:12] Speaker B: What did you just do?
[00:23:14] Speaker A: I, I, I thinned the, thinned the model right.
[00:23:18] Speaker B: By a quarter. So you, you knocked out 75% of the possible X's, right?
[00:23:24] Speaker A: Yes.
Yeah.
[00:23:25] Speaker B: Now, you can't ask the same question twice.
Obviously, you can't ask is it hard again? But if you said it, okay, go ahead.
[00:23:33] Speaker A: What would be next card? So I, I can say, is it a face card?
[00:23:37] Speaker B: And I would say no. So now you eliminated what, four, four cards of the cards here?
[00:23:42] Speaker A: Right? Okay. I can say, is it under 7?
[00:23:46] Speaker B: And I would say yes.
[00:23:48] Speaker A: Okay. And then I could, you know, go, is it under three?
[00:23:54] Speaker B: No.
[00:23:55] Speaker A: Is it four?
[00:23:57] Speaker B: Yes. Algorithm got A little sloppy. At the end when you asked, you ask the same type of question twice. But when we do this in class, we do it with a dictionary.
And somewhere in my move I have packed in my house I have a 5,000 page 1961 abridged dictionary. And I pick a word out of that dictionary and I say, you have to ask me questions and figure out what my word I picked. Right. In 11 questions you should be on the page. In 17 questions or less, you will have the word wow, wow. And you do that by splitting the dictionary half and say, does it become before page 2500? And then once you do that, you keep splitting that dictionary to smaller and smaller.
Yeah.
Shannon, the dictionary game works because you understand how a deck of card is organized, how a dictionary is organized. With Shannon, they have tools to figure out what your problems, your process or whatever you're working on. Dictionaries organized.
[00:25:04] Speaker A: And these are qualitative tools and quantitative tools. Right?
[00:25:08] Speaker B: Qualitative and quantitative tools. Okay, now here's the real thing that you, you mentioned earlier about people getting scared about all the statistics and everything.
When I look at the training we do on, on Six Sigma, it is so complicated. The statistics, normal curves and normality and F tests and all this stuff, right?
You don't need to know it.
Gain's tools are statistically valid.
Pass any statistician that looks at them as like, these are statistically valid tools. A lot of them are very complicated, but they're very practical.
So for example, on a minitab gauge R and R, the output is a bunch of numbers, right? And you need to understand what percent study is, percent tolerance and number of categories and you got five rules of thumb and all this stuff. When I taught that class, maybe it's just because I'm a bad teacher, but I could spend a day and a half and if I was lucky, one person out of a hundred would walk out of that class with an understanding on how to do an MSA.
The same thing.
Shannon's tool is graphical.
In 10 minutes, I can teach the executive of a company or person on the floor how to look at the results of a measurement system analysis and understand, is it good, is it bad, is there a resolution issue? Is it repeatable, does it have a bias? It's, it's like it's so easy. You just look at it. It's graphical, you can understand it practical, which is, you know, six sigma. I can even show the output of a six sigma to a two people who have had it in the past, do they Remember, nine times out of ten they don't remember what the rules are.
[00:26:52] Speaker A: So you, you've taken something that is, it's a little more complex and, and made some kind of a graphical representation.
[00:26:59] Speaker B: But okay, super, super easy to understand. We do a lot of doe's. So. You know, the one thing I do want your, your viewers out there to do is be very careful. If you go online and you look up Shannon, you're gonna find, you'll probably find Shannon's website, I hope. But on top of that you will find these crazy articles that like really bash the methodology. There's, there's one out of Canada that I know is, is crazy. Like you says you have to have extremely large samples and high volume operations. Absolutely not.
I have worked many projects with a single part.
I've worked many projects with millions of parts. It is what it is. It's your part of your dictionary. You just figure out what you can leverage. Right?
There's, there's articles in there that you'll find like, oh, it's, it's, you know, it doesn't handle interactions. Where did that come from? I work with interactions all day long, so yeah, I don't know where this stuff come from. So if you really want to understand Shannon, especially if you're with a business and you're interested in doing this, give them a call and they will set you up with someone that will give you an overview of the methodology. And it's a game changer. Like it will change the way you do problem solving.
[00:28:21] Speaker A: Learned a lot from our conversation and this one, but I can see where there are some similarities. But it's funny, in Six Sigma there's so many different variations of Six Sigma that, that it's again, it's become kind of watered down. There are black belts that I've met out in, in the world that know nothing about statistics. I mean they have no clue, they can't do a doe. They, most of them don't really didn't understand the term capability. Right. And they're black belts. So it's so easy to get a certification and, and add that on your resume and get into a company and really do bad things. So I'd like the fact that Shannon's got an IP and you know that it's the integrity still there. What, what I hear from Shannon that resonates to me is, is I, I think the Pareto chart is one of the most important tools in problem solving ever. Because again, I go into, I go into companies that they want us to solve the large problem, the big problem, you know, solve world hunger. And we say, yeah, you can't solve world hunger. You need to find out with your data, where is that one village in one country, you know, that. That seems almost too small or insignificant to even care about and make the change there.
And you can use a Pareto chart to even get you down to where, where the input is.
[00:29:49] Speaker B: Yeah. So the two ways that I communicate that, especially when I'm into a, like a new company or a new plan, like if you look at any business, what are they in the business of making? They're making in the business of making money.
Even though they make products, they're there to make money. Right. So what's the biggest thing that they want to work on? Well, the biggest thing that's costing them in their plan.
So when you Pareto out the scrap or rework a warranty, we also weigh in customer complaints because that might not be the biggest issue for the plant, but it is for future sales and for the future of the company. So we weigh that in as well.
But that's one of the biggest selling points is that there's. There's a whole management class that Shannon puts the. When the plant goes through, wants to do training in the class, they. They put their management through this executive leadership class so that they know how to sponsor projects. And a big part of that is this rolling top five project selection, which is pretty slick because everything's prioritized on this rolling top five concept. Right. I work with one plant now that that has. They can pull on the fly a rolling top 10 of all their scrap rework issues in their entire plan.
Like I just hit a button. Power bi just spits out everything for that.
[00:31:04] Speaker A: Amazing. Is there a kind of a management level version of Shannon in lean? There's. There is tools that you can use to prioritize projects, ocean conoring and stigma, you know, in a lot of the other tools. But it sounds like Shannon's more of a specific problem solving tool. It's. It can it be rolled up into, you know, an organizational process.
[00:31:31] Speaker B: So Shannon does not only do like production problems type solving, they also do reliability stuff. They have something called resilient engineering.
So if you're familiar with the Humvee, replacement is a new vehicle that is being made by the US Military.
Well, there was a battle for the contract on that with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and a company called Oshkosh which makes cement mixers. And they make, I don't know, Oshkosh. This meant Oshkosh all the companies had to build. I don't know, I think it was like a hundred vehicles or whatever and the military beat the beat living daylights out of them.
Well what they did was Oshkosh hired Shannon to do the reliability of the electronics package on those vehicles and Shannon crushed it and they sent those vehicles out to be destroyed by the military.
From what I understand it was hands down like Oshkosh vehicle was amazing and they won. This was a 500 billion dollar contract for the Humvee replacement. And then Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin wanted to sue him. They actually tried to sue him for their vehicle and I don't know why they were trying to sue him but anyway that's. And then they also have this thing. I think they call it something different now but it used to be called transactional.
It's business process type approach to problem solving.
I'm not trained in it. I don't know too much about it. On their current slides that he. I have them up on my other screen. It's called detail but I might be wrong on that. Anyway it used to be called transactional when I saw this slide last time. And then resilient engineering is their whole. It's basically DFSS on steroids if I had to describe it anyway.
[00:33:19] Speaker A: And DFSS for those that don't know that that's designed for Six Sigma that's more of a looking forward in a process designing it rather than the demaic which is more of reacting to, to a process.
There seems like a lot of similarities between the two and again I'm, I'm interested in the precursor to Six Sigma so I think we talked about that a little bit. So again chain in the red X is really about finding that significant process or input that is really causing the problem and to be able to find it quickly. I, I heard stories from yourself and some other people that I've found out that practicing and being able to find those problems I mean amazingly quick.
[00:34:09] Speaker B: Yeah the expectation be able to make one dictionary split a day.
Now most projects get solved in seven splits or less and so we're talking less than two weeks for a problem.
Now my record is 15 minutes on a 30 year issue. The F35 one took me two hours.
[00:34:33] Speaker A: These are complex problems.
[00:34:35] Speaker B: Yeah. So you know I don't, I don't. This is funny the word complex like I don't know what that means but because every if teams have been working on it for months and, or years or decades. In some cases. Right. It's complex. Right? It's a complex problem. But when I solve the problem and show it to management, they're like, well, that was easy. We could have told you that.
Okay, then why did you hire me to come in and fix the problem for you?
[00:35:03] Speaker A: It's amazing.
[00:35:04] Speaker B: And the thing that really comes down, I think Dick Shane and I heard him call it like uncommon common sense.
It's all common sense. But it's not uncommon to see it being used that way.
[00:35:15] Speaker A: If you had like a 10 second elevator speech on Shannon and you're, you're sitting in the elevator and somebody asks you, you know, what is Shannon? What would you say?
[00:35:27] Speaker B: You know, I get asked this a lot, but I get asked to do a one pager on Shannon and I've been trying to put a one pager together for I think 15 years.
It's not possible.
[00:35:42] Speaker A: It's just in it. Huh.
Well, let, let, let's do this. If there is, if there was one word to describe your experience and, and history with Shannon, what would it be?
[00:35:57] Speaker B: One word, I think is mind blowing. Two words or one word?
[00:36:01] Speaker A: One. Well, you can, you can put those a dash in between them.
[00:36:04] Speaker C: And that's a wrap on our deep dive into the Shannon methodology. Brian, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing this information with us. It's incredible to learn about a problem solving strategy that has been a game changer for companies like GE and Philips, yet remains largely unknown. The key takeaway for me is how Shaan works backward from the defect, using a progressive search to find the one dominant root cause, the red X.
It's a fascinating contrast to traditional methods that often start by brainstorming a sea of potential causes. And the fact that its tools make complex statistics graphical and practical for anyone to understand is a huge advantage. It really highlights the importance of focusing on solving the problem rather than just getting a certification. A topic we know is a major reason why so many continuous improvement efforts fail. Thanks for listening to why they fail. If you found this episode valuable, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel. It's a completely free way to support what we do. Make sure you're following the podcasts on both Spotify and Apple so you get every new episode instantly. And if you have a moment, please leave us a five star review. It helps us reach more people who are passionate about making real sustainable improvements. We'll see you next time.
