In my last post, I mentioned that we collected 573 rows of topic descriptions from the world’s leading Green Belt certifications. My goal was simple: find the common denominator. Strip away the noise. Get to the essence.
The past two days, I’ve been deep in the “keyword trenches.” I took those 573 descriptions and broke them down into individual keywords to see where the overlap lies.
It turned out to be a dead end.
The initial result was a staggering list of over 2,500 keywords. It seems every certifying body has its own “dialect” to describe the exact same thing. I tried to bring order to the chaos by standardizing the terminology, but I got stuck at 533 unique keywords.
Here is the kicker: 362 of those keywords appear only once.
This means that for the majority of topics, only one certifying body mentions them specifically, while the others don’t. Or at least, they don’t use the same words to describe them.
I could spend weeks trimming that list of 362 outliers, but the progress is too slow. It’s adding “fuzz” instead of removing it. If we want to build the best resource for people who actually want to improve, we shouldn’t be getting lost in a linguistic maze.
I’ve decided to pivot. I’m choosing a different path to bring these various Bodies of Knowledge together—one that focuses on clarity and impact rather than word counts.
To be continued.
The Guy Behind the Project
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