Who Killed Six Sigma? - part two

Picking up where we left off, let's take a closer look at Six Sigma's cause of death and its killers. First, though, let's be clear. Malicious and murderous intent are not to blame for this death. In fact, organizations like GE who have been implicated in the discipline's demise had only the purest and most idealistic of intentions. We'll have to call it manslaughter. But how did it happen?

Well, as we discussed in an earlier post, multinationals like GE began applying the rigorous, data-intensive Six Sigma methodology to every available business problem. In some cases, this yielded some impressive wins. In many, many other cases, however, the toolkit proved too hefty, the methodology too complex, and the pace of change too glacial to make a real difference.

Before long, the Black Belts practicing Six Sigma within these organizations were seen as woefully out of touch with the reality of business. Six Sigma itself was soon viewed as a gargantuan, lumbering beast whose head was filled with eggheaded, unrealistic theories, esoteric acronyms and terminology, and a surplus of bureaucratic hoops to jump through.

Once Six Sigma began to look like an obstacle to rather than an agent of change, its vitality quickly slipped away. Business leaders distanced themselves from it, hiding their Green Belt certifications in a cabinet and looking toward the horizon for the next generation of agents of growth and change.

Those who were charged with carrying out Six Sigma's bidding, even as it lay on its death bed, took the usual paths of grief. Some soldiered numbly on in denial. Others angrily railed against the method's impending expiration and became deeply entrenched Six Sigma acolytes.

But let's not forget that the corporate world's best and brightest had been chosen to study, implement and guard Six Sigma, and with them lies the hope for the birth of something new, something that preserves the methodology's strengths, learns from the lessons of the past, and leads the way to fast-paced and meaningful change.

The mission is simple: to do business better, faster and cheaper. In the next post, we'll start to dig into what the future holds and how we might breathe new life into the world of process improvement.