Something that has been common in my experiences talking with people who are "doing Lean Six Sigma" is the severe lack of time to do anything. Often brought up is the fact that there are so many problems during a normal day that there's little to no time left to do a formal project. What becomes frustrating for many is the pressure from outside to finish a project for some belt certification. Not only that, the business then starts to discuss the Return on Investment of all the training it is providing for belt certifications. It very quickly becomes a frustrating organizational situation for all those involved. There are a few observations I have made through these experiences.
The example often used to describe Lean is one of a river with many rocks under the water. The more water the river has, the less you see the rocks, or in business sense the more you add resources or inventory or waste, the less you see the true problems within your processes. This photo shows an example of the frustrating nature I have come across. There are hundreds of problems, and very little water. The inventory, resources, and waste have been forcibly removed from the process, and we are left with a rocky mess of problems everywhere. What created this situation? Often there are multiple factors at work.
First, there is the push for the company to "be Lean" or "institute Lean Six Sigma." This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's the mindset that goes along with those statements. In many cases the mindset is that of cutting costs and controlling the organization. The Lean mindset is to develop people to see and eliminate waste in the process and give people closest to the value the power to solve problems. The difference here is that though they both reach an outcome of reduced costs, one uses a chainsaw, while the other uses a scalpel. This thought allows for the artificial removal of water in the river exposing all the problems that have been underlying in the organization for years and years.
Second, with a mindset to "institute Lean Six Sigma" the idea is to train people to perform statistical analysis and follow a problem solving process. Again, there is nothing inherently wrong with this, but there is an inherent problem in how it is "instituted." Typically the underlying mindset and business systems don't fully support the improvement focus on Lean Six Sigma. So what happens is to train a select (sometimes a large amount) of people in the methodology, and then the focus becomes on "engaging" those trained and/or certified belts to solve problems. So the people performing the work still have no power to solve a common problem they see everyday, because they aren't trained, and there are other people that are certified that will need to come in and solve it. Think too about the pressure added to someone outside of the process to come in and solve other people's problems. The trained/certified person is not part of the team, and often will spend a large amount of time building those relationships for the project. Because there are so many problems that need a project to solve them, the trained/certified person will probably not come back to this particular team for a while, and so is wasting a lot of those relationships he/she has built.
Third, we artificially lower the water to reduce costs that show so many problems that we become overwhelmed with all the issues that we've very quickly uncovered. Now that all these problems are exposed, we spend all day everyday fighting the fires that have been created. When one of the certified belts gets called in, there is no time to allow anyone to participate in the project, so it ends up being a one person problem solving mission. There is no true team, and the pressure to solve the problems lands on the shoulders of the certified belt or project lead. Without the underlying respectful culture, this situation can become even worse as negativity, blaming, and general cynicism takes over. The frustrations grow, projects are chartered and started, but never seem to finish. Now upper management starts to look at the training programs and managers and looking for answers on why we aren't seeing the return on investment!
So is it even worth training in this way? Sure, in some cases you will find pockets within an organization that the management styles support the problem solving, and supports the continuous improvement mindset and doesn't lower the water all at once. With the true Lean Thinking mindset, one would not just remove all the water, you lower it slowly, exposing a few stones at a time, and manage those stones one by one. Use smaller stones as learning opportunities on the problem solving process. This also creates team building opportunities with everyone getting the chance to learn how to solve problems. Greater still is that we begin to trust each other to make improvements and this starts to empower each other. Those that used to be certified belts, now have a specific role to help teach and coach others in the problem solving process. They come in as support in the learning, and will bring their abilities to help solve more complex problems together.
I have observed the negative side of the institution of Lean Six Sigma more than the positive side of problem solving. This isn't to say that there aren't any positives, because there have been many positive sides to that method. What other companies have realized though, is that this push of performing projects and cutting costs does not win the hearts and minds of employees, and the pressure put on the project leads (some very talented people) leads to disengagement and eventually loss to another company or active disengagement. It doesn't sustain, and eventually the traditional ROI mindset comes in to play. We start evaluating the program itself as a failure and that "Lean doesn't work here" mostly because we just didn't have the time.
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