Are You a Right-Brain or Left-Brain Thinker?
John R. Dew · 1996
One of the best ways to liven up a room of quality professionals is to press someone for a definition of “quality. ” The room will quickly ignite into an inferno of disputes about it. “It’s conformance to established requirements, ” one will argue. “No, it’s understanding variation in systems, ” another will counter. “You’re all wrong, ” someone will shout. “It’s meeting the customer’s expectations!” The concept of quality is envisioned in different ways by different people because people process information and conceptualize situations in a variety of ways. Much of this variation in mental conceptualization and information processing results from the relative dominance of one of the two hemispheres in the brain. The brain-dominance theory Roger Sperry, a Nobel Prize winner, initiated the study of the relationship between the brain’s right and left hemispheres. Sperry found that the left half of the brain tends to function by processing information in an analytical, rational, logical, sequential