Inadequate operating systems limit the success of Lean Six Sigma.

Most of the control mechanisms put in place in your business were put there for the purpose of managing risk.

Risk can be associated with virtually anything – cash flow, business, safety etc. It can also be associated with employee performance and behaviour. Controls can be as simple as a pre-work briefing delivered by a supervisor, or as complex as a comprehensive collection of operating procedures or even an early warning device for tsunamis.

By understanding the risks associated with a business improvement initiative, an organisation can develop strategies for making it work. And these strategies for treating the identified risks can be successfully incorporated in the business in two ways.

• The supporting infrastructure; and
• A management control framework.

So what is a business improvement operating system?

In the context of Lean Six Sigma, an operating system is simply a management control framework that comprises a collection of specific processes and scheduled events that assist you in managing business improvement risks.

Training is not enough!

My experience is that when organisations struggle to sustain Lean Six Sigma over the first few years, it is primarily caused by failing to effectively develop their operating system. Often the leadership team naively believes the implementation will be sustained over the long term without any change to the organisations performance systems and context, with their sole focus on doing training and completing projects. As these organisations mature they slowly realise that important elements of the system are missing.

What are the Signs and Symptoms of an Inadequate Control Framework or Operating System?

Inappropriate projects are selected and allocated to Black Belts and/or Green Belts. Sometimes a solution is disguised as a problem statement, or a process of a low cyclic nature is allocated as a Lean Six Sigma project.

The development of project charters is left to Black Belts or Green Belts; project champions do not take an active role.
Business leaders have not participated in any form of training, the most they have done is participated in some form of alignment or engagement workshop. They do not know what Lean Six Sigma is really about. They have not undertaken or completed change leadership training similar to project team leaders.

• Projects take longer to complete than they need to.
• Black Belts / Green Belts are left with accountability for the project; champions demonstrate interest but not commitment.
• Reported financial benefits are not realised in business financial statements (P&L, Balance Sheet); nor are improvements reflected in business planning assumptions.
• Black Belts / Green Belts struggle with the application of statistical methods or avoid using advanced statistical methods.
• Employees in general know little about Lean Six Sigma and activities within the business.
• There is no consistency in the way projects are documented by team leaders.
• Key learnings are not shared amongst Black Belts and Green Belts.

Signs can also include adverse comments being made by Black Belts and Green Belts with respect to:

• Champion or Process Owner commitment
• Access to resources (including a team)
• Getting time to do the project work
• Being allocated additional work at the same time
• The scope of the project increasing, and
• Project progress

At an even more personal level …

… the symptoms you might experience that give cause for concern about the adequacy of your organisation’s Business Improvement operating system include:

• You are not able to clearly explain what Lean Six Sigma is at the tactical or technical level, and strategic level
• It is your belief / perception that projects are taking too long
• You have limited knowledge of how projects are chosen
• You have little knowledge of what makes a good Lean Six Sigma project
• You have little knowledge of current projects and their progress
• You hear language you do not fully understand
• You do not know the basic tools of Lean Six Sigma

Would you like to know more? Be my guest and download my latest eBook on this topic from my website here.

You can’t sell it if you don’t use it!

THEY just aren’t committed!

Some years ago I had a very interesting discussion with the MD of a medium sized company about the implementation of Lean Six Sigma in his business. He told me about the difficulties he had experienced in keeping the initiative going, telling me it never really became a part of the way work was done in the business. His next level managers weren’t committed to it and over the short-term focus had drifted away from the philosophies of improvement the business PROACTIVELY.

He was concerned about whether or not it was even worth continuing. With so many other things on his plate that it was now becoming a distraction.

So I asked him some questions. Questions like …

• What training did you participate in?
• What tools do you use yourself?
• How do you run your meetings with the management team?

Interesting responses I got …

He had not attended any formal training beyond some ‘executive alignment’ session. But … this grabbed my attention … during that he had also attended to other work commitments, you know phone calls and so on.

He said his work life was very hectic considering his enormous responsibilities, and he did not really have the time to commit to any training. Did you hear that – ‘he did not have time.’

If I had one dollar for every time I heard that!

Okay, he knew quite a bit about the methodology, absolutely no doubt about that. But he had never used any of the major tools from the Lean Six Sigma toolkit … EVER!

I also noted that his approach to meetings and facilitation was the same as … well the same as everybody else’s approach. His meeting agendas were just lists of discussion topics. No defined outcomes or written purpose. The meetings … they were lengthy studies of history, and one of his greatest challenges was getting the team to agree on decisions.

I noticed that he often used phrases like “I don’t have the time”, “the approach has always worked for me” and “what I’ve always done is this”.

You get the picture.

Let me tell you want I told him about his leadership of the initiative.

He ESPOUSED the value of engaging in Lean Six Sigma for the business and its participants. More importantly, he truly BELIEVED it. He committed RESOURCES by putting in place a team of people who focus on the project work and manage the day-to-day Lean Six Sigma function.

Now … listen carefully … when he talks to people about what is happening and he sees the day-to-day operation for himself, he knows that people are INCREDIBLY BUSY (as he is). He’s told by his direct reports that ‘I don’t have time to attend training’, he hears EXCUSES for not doing Lean Six Sigma such as ‘there’s nothing wrong with what I do now, it’s always worked’.

Every time he sees or hears this, deep down inside HE KNOWS EXACTLY what these people mean and are experiencing. These are HIS REASONS for not doing it. He is emotionally connected to THEIR EXCUSES fornot using the initiative themselves, so how can he sell it?

The NON-VERBAL part of his communication conveys HIS TRUE FEELINGS.

So … here’s my point.

If you want to sell something … and we are ALL SELLING … you have to convey and transfer feeling to the buyer. What do I mean by that?

My experience with leadership has been that ‘selling’ and ‘leading’ is the same thing! Isn’t it interesting that we use the term buy-in when we talk about leading change? To sell an idea to your people, to get their buy-in, to CLOSE THE SALE, you have to be emotionally CONNECTED to it, to have feeling for it. You cannot be emotionally connected to the excuses for not doing it. If you were a car salesperson, could you honestly expect to effectively sell Ford or Holden motor vehicles yet drive a different brand of vehicle yourself?

When the customer says she’ll buy the different brand because it is CHEAPER, you’re emotionally connected to that very same reason for not buying the car you’re selling YOURSELF.

A business leader or manager cannot expect to get buy-in for business improvement at any level when they do not use the terminology or tools themselves!

When people give excuses for not doing it you will never be able to lead them beyond that paradigm when the same paradigm is yours. The only way to CHANGE THAT PARADIGM is to DO IT YOURSELF, thus severing the emotional connection to the excuses you get.

I think the phrases used, perhaps to the point of excess, are that leaders have got to ‘talk the talk’ and ‘walk the talk’.

If you are saying you REALLY DO NOT HAVE THE TIME, just hold that thought for a moment.

The CEO of Ford (a company with more than 300,000 employees world-wide) has time to undertake Lean Six Sigma training and champion projects. He has 300,000 employees! [1]

I’m sure we all can MAKE THE TIME.

Any opportunities to include life management training for leaders and managers in the early phases of your business improvement initiative roll-out should be explored.

I now spend the major proportion of my time coaching business leaders and employees in life and personal leadership skills. The intention of this is twofold:

• To help all people realise that CONTINUAL IMPROVEMENT is the key to success in ANYTHING, not something you do as an add-on in business.
• To provide participants with the psychology and tools they need to BECOME MORE EFFECTIVE in all aspects of their life (both personal and professional) and have MORE TIME for proactive improvement.

I believe this is a powerful way to create the mental space and emotional desire to develop business improvement capability and so far this is proving to be true.

Here’s to your continued success.

George Lee Sye

http://www.soarent.com.au

Visit the Soarent Vision website to download some of George’s business improvement eBooks.

Master Black Belts in danger of becoming irrelevant.

Just because people agree doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.

Interestingly enough there seems to widespread agreement on what training is required to develop a master black belt.

Read the following extract from the website of a company offering MBB training.

‘……. has developed and delivered Master Black Belt Certification a two week Master Black Belt program focusing on advanced Six Sigma statistical methods used in Six Sigma projects. In addition to typical Black Belt tools, new tools in areas such as study of variation, multi-vari experiments, nonparametric analysis, destructive testing, handling attribute responses (far beyond Freeman-Tukey), practical experimentation, optimization experiments, handling multi-response experiments, distributional analysis, advanced regression methods, advanced SPC methods and have fun while doing all this!’

This is typical of the offerings that I’ve observed in the United States. Now my question is this: do you notice where the focus is? Clearly it’s a focus on the technical aspects of process improvement, a focus on statistics, a focus on making a master black belt a much better black belt.

The world was flat once.

Do you remember when the world was flat and blood letting was the ultimate cure for disease? Remember when the earth was the centre of the solar system? No, perhaps you remember when technology meantmore time and less paper.

You may not remember when a group of intelligent business people agreed that sub-prime mortgages were a good idea, but as sure as the sun is coming up tomorrow we are all feeling the impact of that agreement aren’t we?

Just because people agree on something doesn’t make it right. Just because the majority of master black belt education focuses on statistics doesn’t make it relevant to the changing needs of the world today.

Where to start?

If you want to know how to develop a master black belt for the modern world, we need to rethink this for a moment and go back to what the role of a master black really is.

What is the role of a master black belt today?

I’ve thought long and hard about this for many years now. During research for my Lean Six Sigma books I’ve had conversation with many of the most respected business transformation leaders in the country and I’ve looked at a myriad of web sites and read the opinions of hundreds of experts in the field.

Today, a master black belt cannot just be a better black belt or a statistician. Training and support software has advanced so much today that advanced statistical techniques should be learnt by black belts. A master black belt on the other hand is required to be a change agent, a leader, a trainer, a coach, a mentor; someone who can lead and create a transformation in business through maximising the potential of the internal collaboration of people and processes.

Their principle role today is to change people’s behaviour. And it is not limited to just employees for the true master black belt can create positive change all the way to the top of their organisation.

What skills does a master black belt really need today?

Will more statistical or technical process improvement training give a black belt the skills they need to perform the role of a master black belt? I think not. The greater challenge today is not in getting better at studying variation or identifying the relationship between process variables. The greater challenge is always in changing people’s beliefs and behaviours. Now in the absence of skill in this area, people generally fall back to the technical merits of a case to try and influence behaviour. We already know how difficult it is to shift behaviour doing that don’t we?

The greatest innovations in leadership have occurred in the past decade.

Over the past decade there have been tremendous innovations in what I will call the ‘invisibles’ of leadership. Actions and behaviours are the visible elements, the things you can observe, the things you take a picture or movie of, the things that managers try to manage. The invisibles on the other hand are those things you cannot see that underpin all human action and behaviour. The thinking patterns, beliefs and emotions which ultimately drive all human behaviour.

These are the skills I believe separates a master black belt from a black belt in the business world today.

• The art of persuasive conversation to lead ones imagination in a way that generates buy in and creates rapid and permanent learning
• Reframing how people view certain beliefs they currently hold and beliefs they have to hold in oder for behaviour to change
• Rapidly and permanently altering the associations that people have with certain positive behaviours they struggle to engage in
• Using existing embedded patterns of the unconscious mind in order to create change and get people to respond positively to requests
• Shifting people’s focus to new endeavours when everything else is competing for their time and attention

If you possessed these skills, how would that change your effectiveness as a leader?

Why does a master black belt need those skills today?

• FIRSTLY – the world is changing rapidly. To remain relevant in the business world you simply need a skill set that is best suited to the existing and emerging context.
• SECONDLY – practitioners who continue to only enhance their technical skill will eventually lose credibility and struggle to compete with those who pursue mastery of modern world leadership.
• And THIRDLY – who better to become a master of change but a master black belt, transformation is their entire focus so the modern day skills of change leadership fit like a glove.

Conventional thinking is only ‘convenient thinking’, conventional MBB education will ultimately make them irrelevant in the modern world.

George Lee Sye

Killing the value of Lean Six Sigma through training!

If there is one thing that drives me crazy today its the endless number of professional training organisations getting on the ‘Lean Six Sigma Education’ bandwagon. Great work by the leaders of those businesses ….. responding to trends, changing strategy to meet market demand, developing and offering products that customers seem to be wanting.

BUT … is this only about them and not the customer?

What if the customer is unable to determine whether or not the product is actually any good? Is the product training or is the product actually business improvement? Training and business improvement don’t necessarily go hand in hand.  Let me give you an example to help explain what I mean.

• A training organisation offers Lean Six Sigma education at a competitive price. Not only is it cheaper, this particular product can be completed in a much shorter time than many other offerings, even as fast as 7 days or even 5 days.
• Companies place their people on the course and they receive their attendance certificates.
• They return to their company to apply their new found knowledge thinking they have the ability now to lead improvement projects using the array of Lean Six Sigma tools they were just taught, and generate massive returns for their company.

Here’s the reality, most companies … most companies today are struggling to get value out of the education their people are being given and it is killing the perceived value of Lean Six Sigma in many quarters of business.

Do you want to know what the problem with public domain training is?

You are being offered cheaper, shorter time frame training because the company offering it is unable to generate a return for you. So training is the product and COST and TIME become the differentiating factor. As long as COST is the primary issue, it is unlikely to become an INVESTMENT with a reportable return. Lean Six Sigma costs should only be relevant in the calculation of your return on investment.

You are being offered training by professional training organisations such as Universities. As strange as this might seem, many of these training courses do not result in a formally recognised qualification; instead the participant receives a local qualification that is not part of any governance framework. The perception of value is created by the aura of training at a University.

On the job mentoring is one of the most important elements in making Lean Six Sigma education work. The most successful companies in the world continually apply mentoring programs. Just like an MBA never guarantees competent leadership, Lean Six Sigma education without an appropriate operating system can never guarantee a benefit.

The hardest factor to deal with is not the technical aspects of process improvement. The hardest factor to deal with is people. And the training being offered mostly focuses on that which is easy to teach – technical elements and tools.

Let me leave you with a few thoughts.

• SHEEP DIPPING, in other words training lots of people in Lean Six Sigma, will never guarantee your success. In fact it can turn an improvement initiative into a liability that financially hurts the company.
• Be very clear about WHAT YOU WANT TO ACHIEVE (e.g. increase margins by 5 percent) rather than what you want to do (e.g. implement lean six sigma, train people etc) and understand how any education contributes to that outcome.
• Lean Six Sigma education MAY NOT BE WHAT YOU NEED right now. Your most rapid returns may well be generated through project leadership support from highly competent professionals.

Good fortune to you in these challenging times my friend

Hello world!

Welcome to Process Mastery with Lean Six Sigma. Why did I give this blog this name … simple … I named it after my best selling book. It has been such a huge success I wanted to share more information about the theme and continue the conversational approach to Lean Six Sigma teaching that began in 2004 when I wrote the first edition.

With the 2nd edition now in publication, I am excited to have this blog up and running at the same time.

Enjoy!

George Lee Sye

http://www.soarent.com.au