Manage-Wise

Six Sigma tar pits

Recently, I facilitated a team that had been in existence for six months. All they had to show for their time was a flowchart of a process that was mainly rework. I had been calling for weeks nagging the team for data about how the process performs. I got part of the data the night before the meeting and the rest of the data by lunch. But after a morning of trying to sort through the issues surrounding the process, the team had fallen into “storming” about the whole process. They were frustrated and so was I.

Encountering roadblocks

• Pitfall No.1: Starting a team when you have no data (line graph and pareto chart minimum) indicates you have a problem that cannot be solved using Six Sigma. Without data to guide you, you don’t know who should be on the team, so you end up with different people trying to solve different problems.
• Solution: Set the team up for success. (1) Work with data you already have; don’t start a team to collect a bunch of new data. (2) Refine your problem before you let a group of people get in a room to analyze root causes.

You can guarantee a team’s success by laser-focusing the problem to be solved. One person can do this analysis in a few days using the QI Macros.

• Pitfall No.2: Question data. To throw a team off its tracks, some member who doesn’t like the implications of the data will state in a congruent voice that the data is clearly wrong. If you let it, this will derail the team into further data analysis. I know from experience that all data is imperfect. It has been systematically distorted to make the key players look good and to manipulate the reward system, but it is the “systematic” distortion that allows you to use the data anyway.
• Solution: Recognizing that this member is operating on gut feel, not data.

Simply ask: “Okay, do you have better data? (They don’t). Then ask how do you know that data’s invalid? (I just know). How do you know? (Instinct, gut feel). Well, unless you have better data that proves this is invalid, we are going to continue using this data. You are welcome to go get your data, but meanwhile, we are moving forward.” If the person is unwilling to continue, you should excuse them from the team, because they will continue to sabotage the progress.

• Pitfall No.3: Whalebone diagrams. When searching for root causes, if your fishbone diagram turns into a “whalebone” diagram that covers several walls, then your original focus was too broad.
• Solution: Go back to your pareto chart. Take the biggest bar down a level to get more specific. Write a new problem statement. Then go back to root cause analysis.
• Pitfall No.4: Boiling the ocean. Teams have an unflinching urge to fix big problems or all of the problems at once. If you have done a good job of laser focusing your problem, you will have a specific type of defect in a specific area to focus on. If you let the team expand its focus, you will end up whalebone diagramming and have to go back to a specific problem.
• Solution: Get the team to agree to solve just this one issue, because its solution will probably improved several other elements of the overall problem. Assure them that you will come back to the other pieces of the problem, but first you have to nail this one down.
• Pitfall No.5: Measuring activity, not results. Companies count the number of Six Sigma Black Belts trained, the number of teams started, but fail to measure the results achieved by these teams.
• Here’s my point: Use data for illumination, not support. Let it be your guide. The answers will surprise you and accelerate your journey to Lean Six Sigma.

Lean Six Sigma mindset

In the August, 2005 issue of Business Week, Michael Hopkins explored the best seller Freakonomics and it’s authors’ strategy for using data to explore and explain the world. They wrote: “Morality represents the way that people would like the world to work—whereas economics represents how it actually does work.”

The November 2005 issue of Fast Company called 2005 the Year of the Economist. Why? Because books like Freaknomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner became a best seller. Financial columnist, Tim Harford says: “The idea of the economist as a detective hero suddenly became easy to sell once Freakonomics climbed the best seller lists.”

Suzanne Gluck, the author’s agent, says that people are using freakonomics as a code word for unconventional wisdom. What’s the secret, Fast Company asks? “It’s just math,” replies coauthor Dubner.

Isn’t that the essence of Lean Six Sigma? Using numbers to explore the hidden side of defects, delays, and costs in ways that reveal the hidden gold mine of profits wasted everyday in businesses large and small.

What’s the “secret sauce” that makes Steven Levitt so successful? Coauthor Dubner says: “He seemed to look at things not so much as an academic but as a very smart and curious explorer—a documentary filmmaker, perhaps or a forensic investigator or a bookie whose markets ranged from sports to crime to pop culture.” He is an intuitionist. He sifts through a pile of data to find a story that no one else has found. The New York Times magazine said he’s “a kind of intellectual detective trying to figure things out.”

Isn’t that what Lean Six Sigma is at its core? Sifting through piles of data like an intellectual detective trying to explain the hidden side of defects, delay and cost?

Excerpt from ‘Lean Six Sigma Demystified’ by Jay Arthur. Reproduced with permission © 2007, Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Limited. Price: Rs 325. Email: Vishwanath_Ghanekar@mcgraw-hill.com