I’m going to go out on a limb and open up a discussion on the "Ultimate Organization" here. In my last two posts, I talked a little bit about integrating the 6S culture in an organization (vs keeping it at a specialist level only) and organizational fear. I figured a logical progression of the overall discussion would be to open up a thread to talk about what the ultimate organization would look like.

Take a minute to reflect on your experiences (good and bad) on your involvement in 6S. Then, if you can find the best scenario for success, fast forward a few years to the end game. What does it look like (from president to the front line)?

There are a few motivations behind why I’m asking the question. The main one is that a lot of times we talk about what doesn’t work, or challenges that we face, but in the grand scheme, I have yet to see a discussion around what "utopia" looks like from a 6S standpoint. Based on the varying experiences and industry affiliations of the readership here, I am really looking forward to the diverse possibilities of answers, as well as some great dialog.

Happy daydreaming!

-K

There’s no doubt that fear can prevent an organization to be what it could be, but what can be done about it...how many times have you been in a situation where there were problems to solve, but no one stepped up to the plate to solve them because of fear? Piggy-backing on my previous posting, this could be another inhibitor to making 6S truly mainstream. Take for example the following:

A defect is identified, and there is no clear root cause. Short term fixes are employed. A person is nominated to handle the problem solving, and as analysis is performed, the exercise becomes one of self-protection. Groups that are involved begin to work on proving that they are NOT the root cause. The activity becomes so muddy that no clear root cause is ever found. Whatever band-aid that was put in place becomes the solution, and the cycle starts again...

What is the bottom line here? To me - fear. Fear of being the guy or gal that stands up to say their department owns the root cause...just like fear shuts down dialog, fear can also shut down team problem solving.
So the question is, how do we foster change so that we overcome fear? How do we create a safe environment for problem solving effectively with free expression?

I have been thinking about various topics regarding Six Sigma recently, and I keep coming back to a question that is hard to answer...if we "do Six Sigma" right, is there even a place for Six Sigma as we know it ten or twenty years down the road?

Consider this.....ten years from now, do you really want to have Black Belts doing project work? Or...do you want Six Sigma tools to be the status quo of how the business is operated by everyone? To me the latter is the end game, but does the "classical" approach to Six Sigma (Black Belts doing projects) fit the end game??...I’m not so sure.

How do we structure Six Sigma in general to better fit the end game of real culture change, instead of creating a bunch of "super problem solvers"?

It’s really interesting for me to look back and think about how many times quality planning has come up as an afterthought. It is staggering for me to think about what could have happened if quality planning was done the proper way.

Here’s an example....one time I was involved with a new product introduction, and one of the major milestones in the quality planning protocol was for gage repeatability to be assessed and acceptable by a certain date. Sounds fine and dandy right? Well, the exercise turned into a frustrating one, as discussions turned into something like "did the gage r&r’s get done today?", without even considering why they were being done in the first place. Moreover, people who didn’t know the first thing about what a grr was were asking the questions.....

I’ve seen this phenomenon across several industries, and it makes me wonder if up-front quality planning generally is really taken seriously at all.....

Now more than ever, the development and use of control plans play a critical role in succesfully implementing a new process. In my past, I have seen varying ways that control plans have been implemented, but I still struggle a little when I try to find a really good example of control plan development.

To me, control plans need to be developed upfront in the development process. This is really important so that key product attributes (ctq’s) are constantly aligned with process control parameters. Some may think that developing control plans this early is a waste of time (since processes typically don’t get defined so early), but why not let the process itself be defined by the control plan?

So how do your organizations use control plans... I’d love to know...

Recently James Considine and Stephen Crate have posted about management styles....and their posts have really made me think about management and leadership in general, especially during these challenging times...

From my perspective, you have to lead people to achieve results. If you are a manager, indeed your job is to manage the business, but to lead and support people as well, rather than manage them. Given the right amount of coaching and "rope" if you will, your employees may surprise you in what they are capable of achieving.

I reported to a manager at one point in my career that I would do anything for. He really led me to higher performance and really coached me in my own management skills - and the things I learned I still use to this day. He always made clear what my objectives were and basically followed-up on progress on an as-needed basis, rather than telling me which discrete tasks to perform. It was my responsibility to come up with my own checkpoints and milestones in order to accomplish my goals, and with his input, I would execute the plan. Granted, there were times that demanded a direct order, but those were in crisis situations which demanded that style.

There are a lot of advantages to leading people to performance - but the biggest advantage is the teaching that occurs during the process. As a leader, a major responsibility that you have is to teach your employees how to plan and how to achieve goals. By doing this, you effectively raise the competence level of them, and better prepare them for more responsibility. This dramatically helps with succession planning for sure, and creates depth in your organization.

Today I was reflecting on a potential topic that could come up in a traditional project involving any test or DOE utilizing a 'p-value' criterion - it actually did for me a few times in the past.

Hypothetically, say for example there is a process that has very low inherent process variation (process s is very low), with a very high Cp or Pp (depends on how you define s, but say 2.0 or greater), yet has a very low Cpk or Ppk (or Z for that matter - basically the process is hugging or is outside either the upper or lower customer acceptance limits, but very stable at this level), so the situation is characterized as a classical optimization problem.

A black belt performs a DOE, and finds a factor that has a P-value of 0.05 or less on the output. Using the information, the new factor setting is applied to the process, and the new Z value has barely improved. The black belt is frustrated, because the factor was 'supposed' to be significant. What gives?

In this case, the effect of the factor was much smaller than the level of optimization needed to make a real difference. But the effect was large enough to make a statistical difference based on the low inherent variation level of the process. A quick check of the main-effects plot (and the coefficients in the analysis for that matter) compared with what's needed to achieve the required optimization would confirm the situation.

So why would this happen anyway? I've seen some black belts "go by the numbers" (specifically p-values) without looking at the graphics....and without looking at the real picture of what's needed at the output side of the project.

A great teacher once told me to look at the graphs first....he was right.

Every once in a while, I'd like to share some reviews of key books that I've read so far in my career that have been particularly useful. For my first review, I'd like to reflect upon Crucial Conversations: Tools For Talking When Stakes Are High - by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler and Steven Covey.

This book has been really key for me in my career thus far (although I still read it cover-to-cover for a refresher). Having a former position as a Master Black Belt, and now as a manager, now more than ever it's been important to work on my communication skills in difficult situations. In Six Sigma, we are all change agents of some type or another, so there are always going to be people that resist change or that want to run interference to making progress. Most likely you have found yourself in a position to have a crucial conversation with these people. Maybe this book can help.

First, this book is copyrighted 2002, so it has been on the market a while - but - the information contained is timeless. The book starts by describing what a crucial conversation is - basically a difficult discussion with the potential for emotion. After this introduction, the first few chapters afterword describe the mechanics and psychology about emotions and dialog. I was really shocked at some of the inner workings on how discussions become heated while going through these middle chapters (like I said before, I use some of this material as a critical reference sometimes), Around chapter 9 or 10, the book moves into practical application of the process of constructive dialog, and in chapter 11, some 'what if' scenarios are presented, which I find very useful to refer to sometimes.

I haven't given any real detail regarding book content in this post, but since I have a few crucial conversations coming up myself, I figured I'd share this gem with you. It's a simple read, and I really believe you'll get a lot out of the book.

Here's an Amazon link

Over the weekend, I happened to stumble upon this news link on Yahoo.

The L.A. Times apparently published a front page advertisement that looked very much like a regular news ad. Of course upon inspection, the advertisement disclaimer was there. According to AFP:

"Publisher Eddy Hartenstein told the Times he had decided to run the ad despite protests from the newsroom because he was trying to ensure the newspaper's survival.

'Because of the times that we're in, we have to look at all sorts of different -- and some would say innovative -- new solutions for our advertising clients,' he said."

Here is another example of innovation gone bad in my opinion. Clearly, revenue has taken a front seat to customer value in this case, with a potential long-term impact to customers and reputation.

I'm starting to see a trend here....

Throughout my career I’ve had the pleasure of meeting colleagues from a very large variety of manufacturing cultures. Sometimes I talk to people that work in a "mass" environment with poor performance, and I hear about how good it must be to work in an efficient workplace, with relatively good performance. I always get the questions about how easy it is.

Let me tell you...it’s not easy, and by the way - it shouldn’t be.

You might ask me why....and here are some reasons.

The name of the game is continuous improvement. If your organization doesn’t get better, then you aren’t going anywhere. You maintain your improvements be continuously revising your metrics to reflect your improvements. Your plant may start at 50% production efficiency, then move to 75%, then to 90%, then to 95%, 97%, 99%, 99.5%, etc...how hard do you think it is to go from 99% to 99.5% production efficiency? It’s very difficult - probably more difficult than going from 50 to 75%. No doubt, you’re doing much better at 99% than you were at 50%...but then again, the 50% number doesn’t matter anymore, since your system has grown to be much more capable than that.

Now, imagine what it’s like to have this approach with all of the organizational metrics. The unique part about all of this is that this type of culture grooms people into constantly thinking of how to get better every day. That’s a powerful element.

Any people out there living through this type of culture? What are your challenges and how do you get through them?