In a world that every day becomes more and more volatile, uncertain, complex, controversial, and ambiguous, making any decision whatsoever is no light task.

We are told that long before Julius Caesar said, “Alea jacta est,” (“The die is cast”) or Hamlet, “To be or not to be,” our forefathers used all kinds of—often bloody—tools to divine what to do. Likewise, the men who explored space from Earth were more astrologers than astronomers: They made their living from divinations.

Not from “predictions.”

When the ISO/TS 16949 writers ask for “predictive maintenance,” it seems they are thinking in terms of predictability, that is, a given event can be “anticipated, calculable, certain, expected, foreseeable, foreseen, likely, reliable, sure, and sure-fire.”

Six Sigma? Who has ever seen a Six Sigma approach applied to predictive maintenance of machinery? Who has ever seen a Six Sigma approach to decision making?

Raise your hand, please.

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