Quality Workshop for Naval Commandos and Commodores through Origami

I was invited to conduct a Quality Management workshop for the Commandos and Commodores who work for the Indian Naval Quality Assurance department and the focus of workshop was to learn Auditing techniques through Origami.

I started by sharing a standard procedure to make a paper ship and gave them used newspapers which I had neatly cut into pieces. 80% created a clean product and few struggled. This activity was just to make them familiar to the process. Then they were put into teams and asked them to repeat the same exercise and pass the ships they built to the teams next to them and identify the number of extra/unwanted folds that were visible on each ship that was created, ideally to measure the defects. Then I introduced them to the concept of DPU and DPO and the advantages and disadvantages of both the methods. Then the same exercise was repeated with a small change in the rule, i.e I told the team that I need just 8 ships from all the teams and I will take it whichever team gives me first. The teams started creating the ships fast and the same measurement exercise was created and this time the defects were higher. This is to show them the correlation between speed and accuracy.
I managed to talk more on the concepts of Value Stream Mapping and different lean tools and it was a great learning for me as the participants correlated it to their real life problem and asked thought provoking questions and was fun to watch the brave men making paper boats.. I will brag that I one commanded the commandos :).