True enough, but not the whole story. The fact is that when I look at what my clients do with Lean Six Sigma, and review projects from students, I can see that they are, in fact, innovating. In Phase I, when companies begin Lean Six Sigma, it is usually viewed as an initiative and the first efforts focus on creating a culture where change is possible, organizing an infrastructure for change, training a cadre of part- and full-time change agents, and pursuing projects chosen to move the organization towards its vision. This sets the stage for innovation. The real transformation here is in the way people in the organization think, specifically:

• They are fact and data driven. Opinions are considered the source of hypotheses to be tested, not absolute truth. The change agents have the tools they need to rigorously test these hypotheses.
• They are customer focused and they know how to identify the voice of the customer. This gives them insights into customers needs that go well beyond what customers explicitly say their needs are.
• They think of organizations as processes as well as functions. They understand that functions exist to serve stakeholders and enable core processes.
• They understand variation differently than their untrained counterparts. They know that some variation demands an immediate response, but other variation requires system changes. They know how to tell one type of variation from the other.
• They think of results as stemming from systems rather than individuals.
• They know that outcomes–both wanted and unwanted–are caused, and they know how to drill down to these causes. I.e., they understand that processes are transfer functions that transform inputs into outputs.
• They understand the importance of focusing on the few critical to quality drivers, and how to identify them.
• They know how to organize people for change.

By design the time spent as a full-time change agent is limited. Black Belts serve their terms and return to the organization in other roles.  As time goes by these Lean Six Sigma change agents begin to change the organization’s DNA. Phase II occurs as the culture change takes hold and the change agents, now in key leadership positions, see the Lean Six Sigma approach as the best way to lead the organization towards its vision. They see that they can create new and innovative ways to serve their customers’ latent needs based on the intimate knowledge of the customer and the insights gained using Lean Six Sigma on a smaller scale. They better understand the organization’s capabilities based on experiences learned during the deployment of the initiative. Lean Six Sigma moves far beyond discrete improvement projects and becomes the  framework for leading the organization as a whole towards its vision.

Lean Six Sigma also teaches leaders a new way to lead. Their involvement in defining the organization’s core processes and enabling functions, identifying process owners, finding opportunities for improvement linked to their strategies, defining the drivers of these opportunities, selecting relevant metrics for the drivers, and linking the metrics to activities throughout the organization (including but not limited to Lean Six Sigma projects,) gives them a new way to get things done.

The combination of a new way of thinking, intimate knowledge of the customer, a culture that embraces and expects change, and a powerful new way to lead, makes it possible for the leadership to bring together disparate parts of their organization all focused on a single purpose: wowing the customer. In short, innovation. This is not the aforementioned clumsy and ill-advised attempt to measure the unmeasurable or to “manage the innovation process,” it is an inspired expansion of the scope of Lean Six Sigma from a purely operational improvement tool to a purposeful search for innovative improvement opportunities. It is the application of the core principles of Lean Six Sigma to the  problem of creating a resilient organization that not only responds quickly to changing customer needs and competitive pressures, but also improves the human condition by creating products and services never before conceived.

In summary, Lean Six Sigma becomes the springboard for continuous innovation. It’s a natural extension of the idea of continuous improvement.

Six Sigma everywhere. Some organizations apply Six Sigma where it really shouldn’t be applied. For example, one of my clients tried to apply it to an R&D operation. The poor folks trying to create something brand new from scratch were forced to try and figure out how to measure their progress, submit regular reports, track metrics on control charts, show process improvements, etc. It was a disaster. Six Sigma is a process improvement methodology, and it generally does this by reducing variation and eliminating errors and waste. Creativity involves innovation and risk taking. It deliberately introduces variability by changing things to try and discover something new. It is inherently and unavoidably wasteful. There is no process for understanding inspired creativity and it can’t be quantified until after it has generated failures and successes. The value of innovation can’t be measured until after something great has been achieved, and it’s not possible to tell if you’re 1% of the way to the achievement, or 99%. You won’t know until you get there.

The Elites Six Sigma has an infrastructure of “Belts” that have an air of elitism about them. Of course, there is also an air of elitism around other groups within an organization. In manufacturing it is the engineers, in healthcare the physicians, in insurance the actuaries. Why all of the animosity towards the Belts? My theory is that it happens so fast, and it happens to people who already have a defined status in the organization. One minute John or Jane are ordinary blokes, the next they are exalted Black Belts. What’s up with that? To help promote Six Sigma in organizations just starting the initiative, the newly minted Belts are announced on the company web site and written about in the company newspaper. To make matters worse, the group of Belts use jargon that others can’t understand and, frankly, some of them lord their new status over others.

Still, having this cadre of people whose job it is to pursue change project is perhaps the single most important thing that made Six Sigma work where TQM and other change initiatives failed. Organizations didn’t just mouth nice sounding words about the importance of change, they put their resources where their mouths were.

Most people don’t like change. In my boyhood home of Nebraska there was a common saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” The message was clear: don’t change anything unless it is absolutely necessary. The problem with this approach is that, in a world where your competitors are changing things at a rapid rate, if you wait until the need for change is painfully obvious, you may be too late.

Nobody wants someone telling them how to do their work. If you’ve been doing a job for a while, chances are you’ve become pretty good at it. No matter how much training you received, you learned a lot from the school of hard knocks. Now along comes this bunch of outsiders telling you that they have a better way of doing things. The reaction? Yeah, Right! If the team knows what they’re doing they will ask you for your input and they will use it to make your job easier or better. But if they don’t, they’ll make it harder and less pleasant.

Fear of job loss. It can be frightening to see how much waste there actually is in some systems. I’ve seen departments with 25 people before a Six Sigma project and 5 afterwards. The smart company will plan for this kind of impact and have new jobs for those no longer needed. But many companies simply let the displaced people go. It’s no wonder that the result is fear of Six Sigma shining a light into your work area.

Unintended consequences. If the team isn’t extremely careful, Six Sigma projects can break one thing as they improve another. The control phase of the project is supposed to prevent this from occurring, but sometimes it happens anyway. Despite all efforts there will be times when changing something results in unforeseen problems, it is the nature of change. When it happens, it will produce resentment.

Six Sigma is used when a simpler approach would’ve worked just as well. Six Sigma DMAIC or DfSS projects have their rightful place. But let’s face it, the Six Sigma approach is a problem-solving sledge hammer. Sometimes a fly swatter is more appropriate.

Six Sigma people get credit for ideas originally conceived by others. One of the main bailiwicks of Six Sigma is the problem that has been “solved” over and over again. When chronic problems are attacked by Six Sigma teams it is almost certain that the final solution will incorporate elements of things that were proposed, and maybe even tried, in the past. The people who had thought of the the fix before the Six Sigma team probably tried and failed to get their solutions implemented. Six Sigma tends to receive more resources and management support than lone problem solvers. The resulting hurt feelings can be ameliorated-but not eliminated-by recognizing those who tried to raise the flag in the past.

While some of these things can be avoided, Six Sigma will always have its dark side. Six Sigma is all about change and change is inherently risky. However, change is also vital to survival. The battle between stagnation and chaos is never ending.