How to Use the PDSA Cycle in Your Daily Life?

In order to help an organization embrace quality and continuous improvement, even a small business, it is very effective to help people see how they can use simple quality tools in their daily life first, like for example the PDSA Cycle.

There are many ways to take advantage of quality thinking to save time and money. You can even start applying quality tools at home, and then implementing them at work will come naturally.

Many lean tools like 5S (here's an insightful article that provided more details about implementing 5S) and poka.yoke are great lean tools that are very much applied at any kind of organization, including kinder gardens and even at home.

A tool that I constantly use is the PDSA cycle (Plan Do Study Act). This cycle was designed by Walter Shewhart, and popularized by Edwards Deming in the 50’s when he travelled to Japan to help rebuild their industry after World War II. It soon turned famous, and became the structure of many quality methodologies like Lean, Six Sigma and ISO 9001 (if you recall the DMAIC six sigma Cycle in the article “How to develop and nurture a six sigma culture”  you will notice it resemblance with the PDSA).

This cycle is part of my daily life since I am very young, even though I wasn’t even aware there was a tool like this. It works like this: