Productivity in Problem Solving

I've been a black belt for many years now and have been involved with a lot of problem solving assignments. These projects require charters, meetings, checklists and reports. You tend to have conversations about the problems with dozens of people, one at a time. There's a lot of routine work involved, as with any project.

But nearly everything I learned about the problem came from analysis of data. Collecting evidence about process behaviour, or running a designed experiment provides new insights almost every time. So if you're tackling a difficult problem, you need to be on the floor, or in the lab, measuring parts and collecting data.

Solving quality problems is a scientific endeavour. If there's no data, it isn't science.