How Many Defects Does Your PowerPoint Have?
- Chris Terrell
- Oct 23
- 3 min read
If you’ve spent time in operations, you’ve heard the gospel of Six Sigma. Three defects per million? Chef’s kiss. On an assembly line, that level of precision makes sense. But most of us aren’t rolling ball bearings off a conveyor—we’re shipping slide decks, Jira tickets, emails, and decisions. The math doesn’t map neatly… and that’s the point.
I’ve been in rooms where “we need Six Sigma” gets tossed at everything from quarterly planning to font choices. Meanwhile, the most polished deck in the building can hide a thousand process defects: ambiguous handoffs, missing context, no source of truth. It looks perfect on the surface. Underneath, it leaks.
Here’s a reminder from the factory floor: moving from one sigma to two sigma roughly doubles your “good output.” Going from two to three gives you a big step again. After that, each sigma-level improvement buys increasingly small gains. In manufacturing, that investment curve is worth it because the work is highly repeatable and the cost of a defect is obvious—you can count the cracked parts in a bin.
In knowledge work, the bin is invisible.
We bring a factory metric into a domain where novelty and personality mask the true defect rate. If your “product” is a decision, a plan, or a handoff, it’s easy for a slick story—or a strong opinion—to drown out the misses. We celebrate the win (“We sold the deal!”) and skip the questions that matter (“Was it the right deal, for the right customer, with the right setup for delivery?”).
So what do we do with sigma thinking when the work isn’t a conveyor belt?
Decide where precision truly matters. Not everything needs to be five sigma. Brainstorming? One sigma is fine—error is the point. Handoffs, payroll, client billing, data migrations? You want three sigma minimum, and often four-plus. Make a “precision map”: list your top 10 repeatable activities and label the required level of consistency (Low / Medium / High). Now you’ve got permission to tolerate mess where learning happens and demand rigor where defects are expensive.
Turn repeatable tasks into systems. If you do it weekly, it’s a process. Write the steps. Put them in your tool. Add a checklist to the board item or ticket template. Create the “minimum viable ritual”: inputs, owner, deadline, definition of done. Most teams jump from “tribal memory” straight to “big platform purchase” and skip the boring middle that actually drives sigma up—clear steps, visible state, and a single place the work lives.
Instrument the handoff, not just the output .Manufacturing checks parts; we need to check understanding. Before you call a task “done,” ask: did the receiver get everything needed to start without pinging me? If not, that’s a defect. Add a tiny acceptance checklist to the handoff (context link, assumptions, constraints, one-sentence summary). You’ll watch variability fall without a single new tool.
Defend transferability. Your clever UI or bespoke spreadsheet might work for you—and fail for the next person. If a task can’t be picked up midstream by someone else, you are incubating defects. Design for the second user. Fewer clicks, clearer labels, obvious next step. Shadow how real users navigate; their “weird” path is your reality.
Stop optimizing for novelty where consistency pays.A fresh chart is not a better process. If your metric stories can argue anything, you don’t have a measurement system—you have decoration. Decide which numbers drive behavior, then lock them. Every time the audience changes the story, variability climbs.
Process isn’t about killing creativity; it’s about deciding where creativity belongs. When you aim your sigma effort at the parts of knowledge work that are actually repeatable—handoffs, rituals, definitions of done—you reduce the hidden rework that chews up weeks.
Process Debt Truth: Most teams don’t need Six Sigma everywhere—they need three sigma in the right places and the discipline to leave the rest delightfully messy.
Comments