If Six Sigma Is So Easy, Why Isn’t Everyone Doing It?

It's so easy to complicate it!

Thu, 10/22/2009 - 05:00

At the 2009 National Association for Healthcare Quality conference, I gave a speech on lean Six Sigma simplified. At the end of the session, one of the attendees asked, "If Six Sigma is so easy, why isn’t everyone doing it?" My answer: Because we’ve made it too complicated, expensive, and hard to learn.

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Seth Godin, author of Unleashing The Ideavirus (Hyperion, 2001, download it from www.ideavirus.com), says: "Ideas that spread, win." Six Sigma has been spreading, but slowly, at great expense and mainly in large companies. How can the quality community make Six Sigma easier to spread?

Let me begin with a story.

A woman I know went on a date with a man she’d just met. He took her on a picnic where they had to walk up a trail onto a small hill with a view of the foothills. I saw her recently and she was still dating the same man. She told me, “I don’t know how it happened, but six months later I was standing on top of an 800 foot pinnacle in Utah after a free climb.”

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Comments

Jay,
I think it goes beyond making Six Sigma complicated. It's been my experience that management waits until the 11th hour to address an issue that they've been aware of for quite some time. It's only when they're forced to address the issue that they consider Six Sigma, but only if it delivers a quick miracle otherwise they're not interested.
I've often marketed the 'low hanging fruit' concept to management as 'Rapid Six Sigma'....this way they experience positive results and are more willing to sign on for the duration of the project....it's all about marketing.

Sandra Gauvin
http://CurrentQuality.com.

there is not one body of knowledge or even a universally agreed upon process for DMAIC (Six Sigma process/product improvement methodology).

For example, in my organization, Champions & Green Belts are given a lot of training on the LOGIC of DMAIC problem solving and very little statistics training; Black Belts get the LOGIC & the usual statistics training.

This gives me Champions who can review projects (and remember how to use DMAIC after training is over), a large population of potential Green Belts (who must lead a project) and Black Belts who are approached to be internal consultants (to keep spreading the culture while they work on their own assigned projects).

Jay,

Great topic. I agree that most people still don't really understand Lean OR Six Sigma. That's one of the reasons Quality Digest published a paper that I wrote just a month ago about using Lean and Six Sigma to improve 'your airport experience'. It is a real problem that we have all experienced. I just showed how you can apply some simple tools to improve the time and reduce the variation in the trip.

The goal is to use the tools that are needed, when they are needed and keep it simple. Of course you still need to make sure management understands the philosophy of Lean Sigma; that's still critical in a rollout success.

Last, I have facilitated some of my best successes with teams when I DIDN'T actually give the team the name of the tool I was using. (my favorite is an FMEA). But once the team sees the result I let them know, 'oh, by the way you just performed a Failure Modes Effects Analysis'. It's great when their response is - 'really? that wasn't that hard'.

Submitted by gchadha on Thu, 10/22/2009 - 14:31

Thanks for an inspiring article, Jay!

I want to appeal Forrest Breyfogle and Donald Wheeler to get-together over beer and come-up with a limited number of bullet-points on statistical analysis that they both agree. This would be a great value-added activity for the statists i.e. people who apply statistics in their day-to-day jobs but are not trained statisticians.

Cheers!

Guru
(Gurbachan Chadha)

Submitted by tomfrye on Fri, 10/23/2009 - 04:25

You sir are a heretic. Six sigma is the best thing since sliced white bread. It has done everything but cure cancer. Imagine if Ed Deming and Joe Juran were Black Belts, what a wonderful world this would be.

Seriously, this is the best Six Sigma article I have ever read. It exposes the fact that the emperor has no clothes. Most bb's and gb's I have met know enough to be harmful and not much more. The freshly minted bb with his suitcase full of statistics typically does more harm than good. Give me an experienced problem solver with detailed knowledge of the 7 tools, some Taguchi and most importantly the ability to understand what to change and how to change it over an army of black belts with their heads up their Minitabs anyday.

Submitted by yuzwam on Mon, 10/26/2009 - 14:01

I totally agree Jay,

As we move more toward applying these principles in transactional environments in service industries we are faced with a couple of fundemental differences from manufacturing environments:
1. People are less likely to have fundamental statstics knowledge in service industries.
2. Transactional environments are much less likely to be as far down the road on their continuous improvement journey then manufacturing industries, and because of this, there is much less need to use complicated statistical tools to have a dramatic effect on results.

I have been working in the transactional world for 6 years now, and most transactional processes are so broken that basic statistical and lean tools are all that is needed to have make a big difference. It will probably be many years before the processes get up to 4 sigma levels - let along 6 sigma levels.

The challenge is how do we make process improvement simplified and easy so that those people who have never been exposed to quality tools realize the benefits and begin their journey.

I think your mountain hiking analogy is perfect. The answer is to take it slow and build their confidence.

marty yuzwa

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