Understanding Interactions

A large gas and electric lawn product manufacturer was experiencing starting problems with its gas leaf blowers. Blowers are developed on two lines – line one had a large amount of scrap, and line two had none. The blowers would not start because a component that should rotate freely was stuck.

Quickly determined that the scrap parts on the line with defects were caused by an angled hole in one of the two mating parts. When comparing line one to line two parts, identified an obvious difference. The bad line’s mating part was coated with black phosphate, and the good line parts were coated with gold dichromate. Black parts are rough, while gold parts are slippery and can overcome friction caused by angled holes. However, engineers argued there was no difference between the two since both met material specifications.

The four points in the visual below show whether a component is stuck or free. Three points are at a low scrap level. One point is at the high scrap level – the spike interaction. A spike interaction occurs when two independent causes come together and cause an event to occur. The holes are labeled as Best of the Best (BOB) and Worst of the Worst (WOW).

Demonstrated creativity when drawing the image for the leaf blower. Carl was a mathematical genius who was the chief statistician at GE. He worked on the atom bomb. The combination of the leaf blower image and Carl’s math resulted in a patent.

The image below has a vertical performance scale that goes from 0 (worst) to 1 (best). The horizontal axis goes from not being logical to being logical. The lines inside the graph form a triangle. The line parallel with the horizontal axis illustrates not being creative and the line that’s steep represents being creative. The only way to get a best value of 1 is to have a creative individual (Tim) and a logical counterpart (Carl).