The Art of Communication in a Six Sigma World

By Steve Wilcox

Whenever a tough question reached the boiling point for Dr. W. Edwards Deming, the acknowledged father of American quality process, this query usually put the issue to rest: “Show me your data.”

And so it is for companies wrestling with how to get the most mileage out of their communications budget. Is it art or is it science? Should we defer to the engineers or go our own way? Can we truly apply Six Sigma principles in a creative endeavor? Do we have enough data?

For more and more marketing organizations within companies across a wide spectrum of the American economy — really wide, including financial services and healthcare — those manufacturing guys have touched a nerve. Quantify everything is the mantra. It means finding a way to give feel-good reporting on advertising return and PR placements a numerical score by which to make financial assessments. It means finding a better way to build teams and reward their efforts. And it means finding the right mix of information for both the quantitative, by-the-numbers hardliner and the creative, well, creative.

The numbers don’t tell every story. Some organizations now preach that after all the numbers are crunched, trust your gut instinct. The thought holds that there’s a human element in all of this attention getting and flag waving. It needs to be professional, it needs to meet objectives, there should be a plan, but it doesn’t mean you should wring all the creativity, dare I say fun, out of the process.

Who among us has seen the Ishikawa fishbone diagram applied to the standard creative brief or a Pareto chart that reflects new efficiencies in writing a press release. There are always extremes. But there’s something to be mined from a process that can wring an extra ten cents per unit out of producing a distributor cap. It’s not over-the-top creative, but it’s absolutely efficient.

So we need to find the right combination of numbers to meet the needs of the Dr. Deming’s of the world because those folks will definitely ask the numerical question. And we need to leave something for the out-of-bounds, not-the-way-we-always-do-it types who can find a diamond in a soybean field. At midnight. Without a flashlight.

There’s a place for everyone at this table. The way to start is by acknowledging everyone actually gets to have a chair.