As this is usually a very smart group and since we all want to impress each other with our knowledge, the list grows quickly. We all know how this works, we get a group of experts together into a room and we start brainstorming potential causes. The power of the technique is that with each guess half of the remaining words are eliminated. “Does the word start with the letter M or higher?” With that method, the questioner can be successful in finding the word in a maximum of 18 guesses in the modern online OED of over 170,000 words.
Eventually, the questions become much more effective by splitting the dictionary to reduce the potential answers, i.e.
Those who haven’t played before might ask questions such as “Is it a verb?” “Is it an animal?” and so on. One person picks a word from the dictionary, any word, and the rest of the players ask only yes/no questions to guess the answer. For those who’ve never played, the game is simple. In my early problem solving education I vividly recall having DOE tools compared to the “dictionary game”. Let’s walk through the problems with the tool: I have even gone so far as to remove them from my own personal toolbox and I’d like to get a conversation started on whether this tool belongs in the modern DOE toolkit. It doesn’t accomplish what other tools do, it has unique problems that are often overlooked when using it, and I haven’t yet seen a case where the use of the Fishbone has resulted in significant breakthroughs in an investigation. Every time I’ve had updates to my training or worked with others through their certification process and come across the usage of this tool I find myself asking the same question again and again “Why is this considered a problem solving tool?”. Ever since I started learning DOE techniques over 20 years ago, starting with Shainin and moving through Six-Sigma and Lean Six-Sigma, I’ve had an uncomfortable view of the Fishbone diagram.
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