THEORY 81
ISHIKAWA’S FISHBONE MODEL
Use to analyse the cause and effect of problems.
Kaoru Ishikawa argues that it’s important to explore all of the things that could cause a quality problem before you start to think about a solution. His fishbone model, developed in 1990, is a way of analysing cause and effect and can be summarised as follows:
Source: Adapted from Ishikawa, K., Guide to Quality Control (2nd edn) (Asian Productivity Organisation, 1986).
The model is a bit like a mind map and is used to represent the problem and its causes diagrammatically. The difference with Ishikawa’s model and more conventional mind maps is that the ...
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