Hi Blogosphere,

I’ve recently taken a big decision. It’s important to know that it is totally the right decision but it was also a big decision.

You know when you make a decision sometimes you agonise over it and, as BBs, we often spend weeks gathering data to ensure we’ve absolutely, statistically verified that the decision we make is entirely correct and will deliver a defined capacity improvement along with a 25% revenue uplift.

I didn’t do that this time and do you know what? It’s probably the best decision I’ve made in 2 years of being a BB.

You know sometimes as BBs we think too much. Sometimes as BBs we work too hard. Sometimes as BBs we just need to stop…just for a minute and take a look about our own selves and see what’s going on.

Let me ask you a big question about the decisions you make. If you were to make a decision today that meant you choosing between a critical situation at work or a critical situation with your closest friend which would win? And I want you to be honest, 100% straight up honest, with yourself. Now, whatever your answer was, you’ve learned something about yourself today.

And that’s the point. This is why I made the decision I have made. This is why I had to get out of this six sigma world.

As I see it, and this only my opinion, the UK corporate environment is breeding a dark habit of late night working and huge personal sacrifice in return for empty promises of future success and potentially significant, yet also emotionally empty, financial reward.

This constant and consistent push for bigger and better financial returns for our businesses, although valid for any growing business, is a short sighted and unbalanced viewpoint which conveniently continues to ignore the really difficult stuff in it’s push for ever more stretching targets and ROI – people.

In the training that we carry out as a team we use an excellent quote attributed to Tom Malone of Milliken Mills, which says “The hard stuff’s the easy stuff. The soft stuff’s the hard stuff. Total quality is 90% a people deal.”.

Through all my time in the blogoshpere I’ve been trying to put across my thoughts on this very point. Six Sigma can be a cold, logical mistress and when you’re dealing with cold, logical machinery and in that context, that’s exactly what she should be. Machines don’t have problems outside of work. They just do as they’re told. Amazingly, and this may come as a surprise to some, people are not machines and don’t always do as they’re told.
That’s why, in both manufacturing and in service industries, I believe George Eckes famous Process Improvement equation; QxA=E [Quality x Acceptance = Effectiveness] still bears relevance. This is how you get your ROI, this is how is should work.

Unfortunately this excellent message is now being diluted and changed. My experience is that the slightly more complex;
(HW+PS) x KSEM = ROI & FB – [(Hard Work+Personal Sacrifice) x Key Stakeholder Ego Massage = Return on Investment & Financial Benefit)] seems to be the new order of the day and, I believe, is not, in any way, shape or form, sustainable.

The focus on people management is how you get your QxA=E and, at the current time, many service organisations and their leaders are under so much pressure to deliver ROI and budget improvements that it is sadly inevitable that the people will come second and the latter equation will become more and more prevalent.

Is this the same everywhere and for everyone? No, of course it’s not. Many people are fortunate to work for employers who think progressively about their people and ensure a positive, client centred, encouraging working climate and I congratulate you for finding one.

For the rest of you…I ask you one thing - don’t sit back and let it happen. Stand up, say what you mean and get the leaders of our organisations to change the things you aren’t happy with or get out and go and do something you’ll actually enjoy.

I’m very lucky. I can absolutely guarantee my new employer will motivate me and ensure the correct level of work/life balance at all times. I know my new employer will pay me a fair wage and expect exactly the right amount of effort in return for that. I know that if my new employer will not use the hour I leave the office as a gauge of my overall performance and I know that my new employer will spend the necessary time to understand and progress my personal development needs to the point where they may even invest in them financially.

How do I know? Because I’m my new employer.

People are my thing (can you tell). From stories of gumball machines to the pleasure I felt in someone getting me to act like a penguin in a car park to my feeling (and still my feeling) that SS in service industries needs to take more care and awareness of the soft stuff, I’ve just wanted to make you think about yourself, rather than your data, for 5 minutes. That’s been my intention through this blog, to let those of you that are lost in the data that there is another life out there. Unfortunately as my passion and motivation for Six Sigma waned over the last year so did my ability to post anything positive, so my apologies for the stop-start nature of my blog however, as my mum used to say, “if you can’t say anything positive, don’t say anything at all”.

I’ve started my own company working with people just like you because I’ve got a real passion to see people happy, content and relaxed. If you were to use 3 words to describe you and your colleagues what would they be? And how big is the performance gap between the three words you came up with and the three words I just used? For many of you, my point has just been made.

If you want to know more about what I’m doing then please come and find my new blog out there in the wider blogosphere. That should be live in the next 3-4 weeks once all the loose ends of finishing employment are tied up.

This isn’t an appropriate forum for promoting my new business and many of you might find it a geographical challenge to use all of my services so if you happen to fall past www.HeadStrongNLP.com you can find out all about it and drop me a line if you want to chat about anything personal or process improvement.

I wish you all the best of luck, the brightest of futures and all the benefits you’re looking for! I hope someone reading this is the revolution waiting to happen…

Goodbye Six Sigma and thanks for listening.

Aloha

Brian

“What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.” Periclese (a long, long time ago)

From a building in the centre of Glasgow a team continues to grow, spread and populate one of the world’s largest financial institutions. The team is ours, the mission (which we duly accepted) was to change the way things were done, to build and prepare for growth and to change an embedded culture of ‘that’s the way it’s always been’.

Now, 2 years since inception, the comforting arms of Six Sigma change are morphing the team into a machine of financially prioritised change work which, although valid in today’s dog eat dog world, I personally have to ask the question – “how long can it last?”

I mean, is Six Sigma change a large scale cost cutting exercise hidden under a veil of due process or is it a vehicle of full scale change in corporate culture? The question is one I, personally, believe is tending towards the former…and that is not a good thing!

I believe the children are the future…oops, sorry wrong blog…ahem…

I will admit, I am not a capitalist and have a tendency to show attributes that are sometimes described as idealistic or even ‘hippy’ but I know I’m not the only one that is beginning to believe that many Six Sigma deployments (for reasons of diplomacy I will not mention if our deployment is included in this statement) are missing their opportunity to change a business not from the account book but from the heads of the people contributing to the account book.

A guy called Robert Dilts produced a model of change called the Neuro-Logical levels (based on earlier work by Gregory Bateson). This model explained how to produce the most profound change in individuals and groups of individuals. Now, the more I study this model and the more I hear about Six Sigma deployments, the fewer I realise are doing anything that is going to create the easily maintainable, long term change in an organisation that our jobs as BBs are initially created for.

The model itself is structured as a hierarchy and I have reproduced it in its most basic format below:

Spirituality
Identity
Beliefs
Capabilities
Behaviour
Environment

In summary of the model, to generate change in any given individual or group of individuals you can change their environment and it will work. For example, I know as BBs we have probably all been involved in producing trackers, posters, dashboards, team positioning etc. and it will work for a while...but eventually the old behaviours will start again because you’ve not changed them. So you can change the behaviour, change processes, remove steps, build systems and you will see the team themselves begin to change their environment to fit their new behaviours…excellent stuff, but it doesn’t change the fact if a group or individual is not capable to do a task then they will not perform. And so we can change the capabilities of a team/organisation through training and hiring new staff…I’m sure you’re getting the idea now - the higher up the hierarchy you go the longer lasting and more pervasive the change.

Now we get into the tough stuff and where I believe the Six Sigma that I have witnessed lacks its real punch. How do we go about changing the beliefs of an organisation or even the identity of an organisation when all our targets, leadership and drive are coming from affecting the bottom line of the hierarchy – the financial environment. If we, as change professionals, want to create change in our organisations we have to start affecting the belief systems and corporate and team identities that hold our businesses back only then can we claim to be purveyors of long term change to an organisation.

This is easier said than done. To make this type of change we need time, training, and strong leadership. We need the skills to inspire as well as manage. We cannot run a Chi-Square on a lack of belief or a confused corporate identity! I’ve got my ideas on some of the approaches we can take and I’ll stick up a post in a couple of weeks time as I’m hoping that this post may spark some debate. As a side note - if you have a way to bring Spirituality to your organisation through Six Sigma then go ahead however that may be taking it a step too far!!

I believe Six Sigma is a great model for change. However, I also believe, if Six Sigma wants to survive, it has to evolve and I don’t know if it has the will or the want to do that. Therefore, as I said at the beginning, my questions remains ‘How long can it last?’

Happy New Year.

There are many myths about what happened to that gumball machine. Some say it was sold to another store where it continued to stay on all day and all night and the problem was never fixed and gumballs were sometimes found in dusty corners. And others tell stories of a tool shop opening in the village where the couple finally bought a screwdriver. There is even a story that the gumball machine finally found it wasn’t a gumball machine after all and it was actually an ATM which explains the stuck gumballs. As I say, there are many stories.

The real end to the story may never be known and as far as I know there are no definitive endings. However, my favourite ending is this one…

After many months trying to run the self maintenance routine a bizarre set of circumstances led to the machine being switched off. This was something that it hadn’t experienced since it was installed in the shop. Over the next few hours the machine found, much to its surprise, that things began to change. It began to realise that to clear the block all it needed to do all this time was to switch itself off, power down and stop the flow of gumballs even for just a few hours. The machine now realised that by powering down it could reset its various counters, cool down its mechanism, and, in time, all the blockages would clear themselves.

Now, every time the machine gets blocked, the machine simply turns itself to off and all the stuck, rainbow coloured gumballs squeeze gently through the mechanism, rest silently at the little metal door and wait to delight the next lucky customer who cares to buy a rainbow coloured gumball.

Anyway, that’s just my favourite ending…after all it was only a story.

Let me tell you a bit of a story and once you’ve finished reading it now I want you to forget all about it until the right time comes to remember you read it all.

There was once a couple who owned a store. The store was in a small village just east of here and because of that it was an unusual store. It was unusual as the stores biggest success was its sale of gumballs. It’s important to note that these were no ordinary gumballs. The couple had found some incredible gumball machines that promised many amazing things. The gumballs came in an amazing rainbow of colours, sizes and flavours and the couple knew once the gumball machines were installed that they would attract many customers.

Now, the gumball machines themselves were extra special as they serviced themselves with no screwdrivers required and, as the locals started to buy gumballs, they found that the village began to change. And, incredibly, the more gumballs they bought the more change seemed to happen and the more changed seemed to happen the more gumballs they bought.

And then the story took an interesting turn…

One summery day, one of the gumball machines developed a fault. The rest of the machines were working fine and as expected the faulty gumball machine began its self-maintenance routine. The usual rainbow of colours from the machine started to stutter and fail but people continued to drop in coins and kept looking for the amazing gumballs. "It will fix itself" the couple said "that’s what they do".

But the machine continued to stick, the sticking got worse and this meant the river of rainbow coloured gumballs started to dry up. The machine, being a self maintaining machine, decided that its best option was to leave itself on all day and all night in a bid to shift the gumballs and fix the problem. Of course, as I know you’ve already guessed, the store closed at night time and once every so often the machine would manage, with a worrying series of whirrs and crunches, to force a stuck gumball through the mechanism, send it speeding through the shiny metal cover and onto polished floor where, after landing with a loud click it would roll quickly into a dusty corner of the shop where perhaps it would one day be found or perhaps it would be lost forever.

The machine kept trying to force the gumballs though and the couple, although confused by the missing stock, left the machine alone as, after all, it was a self maintaining machine.

I signed off on Measure & Analyse last week which, in the way only a leadership /tollgate review can, lifted the pressure involved in gathering all that data and instantaneously dumped the pressure of delivery onto the team.

This project presented such clear problems we’ve been able to go almost straight to delivery. As you would expect this has now manifested in a real push on delivery time. So, the last thing I needed was a dose of Post Tollgate Amnesia (or Tollgatis Zombyitis for the medical professionals among us).

This is, of course, when suddenly following a review a BB forgets how to do anything and spends two days continuing to play with his data and feebly attempting to cobble together some type of plan for the next 4-6 weeks of the project.

I have asked about and found that most BBs seem to have contracted this at some point yet no-one seems to have found a proven cure. It is a bit like a hangover as far as I can see. Many people tell of fabled remedies passed down from MBB to BB but nothing seems to work. I even tried to treat it using one of my Dad’s old hangover remedies and I can categorically state that a raw egg and a pint of Guinness does not help complete a project plan. Please advise your colleagues.

This dose of PTA lasted 3 days. It was full on brain freeze, a mental meltdown, complete cerebral catalepsy. 3 days sitting staring at my blank project plan making random phone calls which served little purpose and trying in vain to find any motivation.

Then, as quickly as you contract a case of PTA, it’s gone. Plans come together, the phone starts finding people who can make a difference, ideas start to flow and suddenly you’re off again. In my case, day 4 came and I must have tripped over my motivation in my sleep because it was everywhere. My plan is now a work of art, my phone is slowly moulding to the shape of my ear (or are my ears moulding to the shape of my phone…), workshops are firmly in the diary and the project is now in full Improve flow. Woohoo, here we go!

I have already resigned myself to a post Improve dose of PTA so if I find some sort of legal mental viagra then I’ll let you all know and if you happen to know of a little know elixir then let us all know.

Hi,

Not one of my usual insightful articles on the world of Six Sigma today (!) more of a request for your assitance, guidance and input.

I've recently taken the job of restructuring the electronic folder structure for our rapidly exanding team and ensuring it is tidy, functional and usable by everyone.

As with all projects and project managers we create many documents which go through countless revisions and are subject to many last minute changes. This in turn creates version control and folders with 12 versions of the same document some with wholesale change some with a spelling correction. I believe this to be absolutely required for us to ensure we are doing our jobs properly but it does create a space issue on shared drives when a lot of people are saving mutiple versions of large documents.

So, what is the best practice for managing all these old version of Solutions Reports, Charters & Quick Win Implementation Plans? Once the project is finished and signed off can we delete them or is that an audit/compliance/regualtory risk? We could burn them all to CD but that just creates a different type of storage and location problem.

How is it worked where you are? I'm interested in implementing best practice and I know you know it. Drop me a line and let me know and I'll publish an 'industry wide' best practice here once it's all done.

Thanks for your help

Brian

Our company has put a recent focus on ‘away days’ for its senior teams. You know the sort of thing. The whole team ups and goes off into the wilds with threats of being left in the middle of nowhere with a tin of soup, a pencil and an elastic band. Living in Scotland we have the joy of many stunning locations in the middle of nowhere and we took ourselves off to Aberfoyle in the Trossachs. One of the few places in Scotland, apart from my local supermarket, where there is no network coverage for cell phones.

This rural setting drove one of my Black Belt colleagues to have 14 of us spinning around a car park, making bizarre gestures with our hands while lightly whooping in an apparent homage to Goblins. This seems to have been the standout activity of the day and definitely ranked as the funniest part of the whole experience. This was closely followed by his later car park based activity when we pretended to be ‘Penguins in Training’ which involved us repeatedly slapping our thighs and whacking ourselves on the head. Feel free to share any of your own bizarre team activities as the next away day is a mere 12 months away and I’m looking for something to top the Goblin whooping!

All in all though it was a really fun, engaging and effective way to get massive amounts of discussion, brain-storming (or ‘thought-sharing’ for the PC mad amongst you) and planning done for what will be an world shatteringly transformational time for our whole company. Our team have been put at the forefront of this transformation and that brings its own cocktail of excitement and anticipation shaken up with a measure of adrenaline and served over ice with a cocktail cherry, a dash of fear and a wee paper umbrella.

It was never like this in the Training team…

I would heartily recommend that next time you need to plan, organise, strategise and envision the future then get yourself well away from the office. Go somewhere quiet, stay overnight, switch off your phone, leave the lap top at home and immerse yourself in the whole spirit of being a team. If your first response is ’I can’t switch off my phone’ or ’i can’t afford a day away from the office’ then perhaps you need to reprioritise and ask yourself some tough questions. The benefits are plentiful and are there to be had if you can just look up from your data long enough to see them. I am now a fully fledged advocate of the well planned and facilitated ‘Away Day’ and if anyone wants any more info on how well ours was run then let me know and i can give you some tips, tricks and info on the penguin thing!

Still no offers of a book deal for my Gather & Fudge methodology. I’m sure it’s just a delayed reaction to the profound nature of the whole concept. Get in touch if you have any refinements to the concept and perhaps I can work them in before I get published.

Speak soon.

When Jack and the lads (and ladies I’m sure) started putting together Six Sigma they got together in many rooms over many months and slowly designed an effective and data based project management and process control structure. For many years now it has worked effectively in businesses across the globe from manufacturing to finance and even into Federal Government. Billions of dollars, Pounds, Euros and Yen and other currencies we wouldn’t recognise continue to be saved and businesses now work more effectively with less waste and world class client experiences through the work of all the Belts from Yellow through Green to Black and the almost mythological sounding Master Black Belt.

Well, it’s the 21st Century now and as a BB of a huge 13 months experience, I propose a radical redesign. I’ve been thinking about it and, to be honest, I’m fed up with Measure and Analyse. I say we replace them with two new phases called Gather & Fudge. Hence we have the newly designed DGFIC cycle. I don’t want to even propose how that is pronounced.

My rationale is this – I am currently at the stages formerly known as Measure & Analyse and to be honest I’m fed up with them. If I have to transpose another piece of data from a business-owned, roughly chucked together spreadsheet into a nicely formatted and data cleansed BB-owned spreadsheet, move it into Minitab, spend far too much time generating beautiful Data Summary charts, boxplots and Histograms that prove the root causes of the problem beyond doubt and then moving the fruits of all that labour into an attractive, and concise, PowerPoint slide for presentation to MBBs and interested Execs then I am liable to go a bit mental and I may even, and this is a big step…I may even take a day off. Harsh words I know.

So, now I say we replace these phases with Gather & Fudge. These new phases involve gathering together all the business-owned spreadsheets and taking a look at them in a room for, oh, about an hour. We then produce some charts using partially fictional data (which we will call ‘assumptions’) mixed with the rough stuff from the business (which we will call ‘raw sample data’) and produce some interesting and ultimately misleading looking charts through Excel and Minitab. We then prepare a 15 slide PowerPoint presentation using lots of big words that back up the hunches that we, as very experienced process improvement professionals, had at the start of the project while comparing them to the hybrid raw/assumed data charts. It sounds fantastic to me and a lot more stress free.

Let’s look at the data. First, cycle time improvement. Measure & Analyse cycle time averages anywhere between 4-8 weeks depending on your business. Cycle time for the new Gather & Fudge, I would assume, would average in at about 4-5 days. Now, as Black Belts, how can you possibly argue with a cycle time improvement of up to 7 weeks.

Second, capacity. Subsequent capacity benefits that F&G bring to Six Sigma deployments across the globe are mouth watering. Perhaps upwards of 2 BBs on an average programme.

And there it is. Gather & Fudge not only explained but demonstrated.

I am willing to discuss the new DGFIC cycle at conferences, seminars and huge corporate events across the globe for a hefty fee.

DGFIC is the future, people. You’re either with it or without.

P.S. I’m willing to discuss anything up to a three book publishing deal if anyone is interested.

So here I am in the iSixSigma blogosphere. Let me tell you, it’s big in here! Thanks for dropping in, by the way. Much appreciated.

An important note before we get going - If you’re looking for lengthy articles on the merits of DoE or my hypothesis on topics such as Lean Vs Six Sigma then you need to find another blog. If you’re wanting to hear honest opinion on life as a Black Belt within one of the world’s biggest financial institutions then welcome, get comfortable, grab a coffee and let’s talk.

I know some of you will have read my wee biography and therefore know a wee bit about where I’ve come from. I know many of you out there will see similarities in our stories and paths and many of you, thinking back to when you first became a BB, will understand and recall what it was like to be where I am and where I’ve been. These are the experiences we’re here to talk about.

Consider it the developing screenplay for the future blockbuster ‘Memoirs of a Black Belt’ - one man’s journey through an ever evolving world of data and VoC. You can imagine it can’t you – "Marvel as a lone BB tackles the IT prioritisation stream, gasp as his analysis of the data shows that the gut feel of the business was flawed and feel the joy as the final pilot shows a higher than expected %age reduction in client complaints. It’s Coming Soon - Memoirs of a Black Belt – a movie for the data analyst in all of us". It’s going to be huge.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to chatting about what it’s really like to be a BB and I look forward to speaking to you all over the coming months and beyond. I encourage your conversation and I can guarantee others want to hear it. How boring is a blog with one contributor? This a blog for all those BBs that joined Six Sigma imagining the James Bond life style of fast cars, sharp suits, glamorous women/men (delete as applicable) and financial security and then suddenly find themselves stuck in dingy hotel rooms transferring post-it note process maps to their laptops at 10 o’clock at night, drinking warm Budweiser and wondering why the one telly channel with anything decent on it won’t work.

I know all of you have thought at one point or another ‘yep that’s me’ and if you have then hang about, say hello and bookmark the page, I’ve only just got started.

Brian

Brian Costello
Black Belt
Barclays Wealth Management

Brian Costello is a Black Belt for Barclays Wealth Management and is based in Glasgow, Scotland. Brian started with Barclays Stockbrokers as a Client Contact agent in 2000 and after a brief spell as a team leader in the Contact Centre was employed as a trainer from 2001 until becoming involved with Six Sigma and his subsequent Black Belt role.

As a member of the first Wave of Black Belts to come through Barclays, he has been at the forefront of moulding and shaping the vision and future direction of both the Six Sigma team and the Six Sigma programme. This has involved the initial challenges and pressures of embedding the Six Sigma mindset in a large financial organisation and the management of stakeholders through the transition away from traditional decision making processes.

As a Black Belt Brian is actively involved in the development and coaching of the Yellow and Green Belt population within the Wealth Management business and regularly enjoys training Six Sigma to all levels from White through to Black Belt.