Chris Chen - The Big Book of Six SIGMA Training Games: Proven Ways to Teach Basic Dmaic Principles and Quality Improvement Tools

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The Big Book of Six Sigma Games was conceived to help you convey the practical wisdom of Six Sigma to others in an enjoyable, energetic, and insightful format. While some of the concepts of Six Sigma can be intimidating (especially statistics!), weve created a resource of games, exercises, and instruments that will help put Six Sigma in a context that can be readily understood and applied.

The games are designed to create a rich learning experience for participants with varying degrees of Six Sigma knowledge. The debriefings and group discussions are flexible enough to address the various Six Sigma experience levels of all participants appropriately. Whether you are training novices, Green Belts, or Black Belts, these games will help keep your training sessions fresh and your participants energized.

Dont be misled by the word games in the title of this book. While the exercises are designed to be fun and entertaining games, they are also powerful learning experiences. They incorporate the principles of experiential learning that help participants understand, internalize, and retain information and principles better than traditional teaching methods.

While some games typically associated with Six Sigma concepts (such as Demings famous red bead exercise) require specialized equipment to facilitate, weve designed all of the exercises in this book so that they can be performed with common, everyday materials. Using playing cards, water, newspapers, and other readily available items, youll be able to explore and demonstrate all of the insights and learning points that make Six Sigma so powerful.

The games are organized in a simple, easy to use construct of chapters based on the Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control (DMAIC) principles familiar to Six Sigma practitioners. Each chapter includes facilitator primers on the concepts illustrated by the games in that chapter. Weve also included discussion questions and facilitator notes to prime the debrief exercises and guide participant learning. However, as you gain experience with the exercises, we believe you will find many new and different ways to apply them in your Six Sigma efforts.

We have chosen not to include such classic exercises as Helicopter and Red Bead in this book. They are widely used to teach quality initiative concepts and are readily available in the public domain.

Each game has the following construct:

Reference Title Use this title to give you and your participants a common way to refer to each game.

Descriptive Title Each game also has a descriptive title (in parentheses after the reference title), which describes the main learning point or process the game is designed to demonstrate. Use this to focus your efforts to select a game.

Description A short description of the design of the game. Use this to get a quick understanding of how the game is designed and how it might meet the needs of your audience.