Have you ever found yourself applying skills learned in a training class towards your everyday lives (work and/or home life)? It happened to me just last night, as my wife (sometimes referred to as my Congress) needed some help with a brochure she was putting together for her business.
By now your first question is most likely: why Congress? Well, it is simple. Have you ever been invited to go somewhere, say golfing or a ballgame, and found that you need to check to see if you can get the time off? Not only from work, but from your family as well? My group of coworkers started to refer to our better halves as “Congress”. That way, we could say things like “I wanted to go to the ballgame, but I couldn’t push that bill through Congress”. Or, “I was hoping to buy that new [whatever], but Congress squashed the funding. Next time I will need to hire some lobbyists”. There, I hope that clears everything up for you. Back to the topic that matters.
So Congress asks me for some help putting together a brochure of sorts to be used at an upcoming trade show. She starts by explaining that she wants the customer to feel a certain way after reading the brochure. With my recent Six Sigma training, I translated her words directly into a few acronyms and settled on VOC (Voice Of Customer). At that instant I got up, went to my desk, grabbed a stack of post-its, and came back to the kitchen table.
“We need to gather as many one-word descriptions that you want to convey to your customers in this brochure.” Congress immediately wanted wanted to know what the hell was going on, since she had never seen me so focused on slapping post-its to the kitchen table before. So we spent about twenty minutes coming up with roughly fourteen descriptions that we wanted to convey, things like “professional”, “easy”, “beauty”, “service”, etc.
The next step was to see if the descriptions had a natural affinity. In other words, to group the descriptions together. Once that was done, we went about putting together some actual sentences. We got two or three done fairly quickly, and then decided to benchmark against similar companies by reading their brochures. In about two hours we had all of the meat there, and then spent the rest of the night haggling about order, flow, etc.
The whole experience was eerily similar to what I had read about in the Jelly Effect. In that book, Andy Bounds describes a process for putting together better presentations, and the methods he uses are similar in nature to what we did last night. I have been trying to follow the advice in the book in order to help me put together my own talks, and I think it has helped. To have his suggestions reinforced by techniques learned in Six Sigma training is wonderful. To find myself actually putting them into practice is amazing.
A long time ago I was asked if I would rather be a brick or a sponge. Bricks are hard to change, but sponges can be altered by simply putting them into a bucket of water. Sure, it is still a sponge, but it is also something more than it once was.
I have often been told that I am a sponge, that I absorb a lot around me, and that is one of the reasons I made a good Database Administrator. It is also one of the reasons why I can find myself getting thrown into difficult situations in life but manage to make my way out. To me, the experience last night is just further evidence of my being a sponge, and one of the reasons why I hope to be able to apply everything I learn in Six Sigma training to my everyday lives.
Nicely put Tom.