- The Expansion to Lean Six Sigma
- Macro Societal Shifts Since 1987
- Current State of the Art
- The Limitations of Lean Six Sigma 1.3
- A New Paradigm Is Needed
- References
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Macro Societal Shifts Since 1987
Lean Six Sigma definitely has been a tremendous success, but the world has changed considerably since Six Sigma was originally developed in 1987. For that matter, the world has changed considerably since 2003, when we published the first edition of this book (Snee and Hoerl, 2003). Six Sigma has morphed and evolved along with the world, but in our opinion, this evolution has not been to the extent needed to move the discipline of continuous improvement to a new level. Before discussing the evolution of Six Sigma and its ongoing limitations, we briefly review a few of these macro societal shifts, discussed in the subsequent sections:
Accelerated globalization
Massive immigration into North America and Europe
Growth of IT and Big Data analytics
Recognition of the uniqueness of large, complex unstructured problems
Modern security concerns such as terrorism and computer hacking
Accelerated Globalization
Obviously, massive shifts have occurred in the global economy since 1987. Motorola was already facing stiff global competition at that time, primarily from Japan, and globalization has accelerated even more dramatically since then. For example, India has become globally recognized for its vast resources in information technology, China has become a dominant player in global manufacturing, and large numbers of call centers supporting customers in Europe and North America have sprung up in developing countries such as the Philippines.
In fact, although globalization is not the focus of this book, it has become a critical issue in recent national elections, as with the “Brexit” vote in 2016 leading Great Britain to leave the European Union, the U.S. presidential election in the same year, and subsequent referendums in Italy and other European countries. There’s no denying that we live in a truly global economy today. This was not the case in 1987, and it has obvious implications for the need to improve to meet global standards of excellence.
Massive Immigration into North America and Europe
Similarly, the matter of immigration has been a hot button issue in many elections and referendums. In addition to immigration concerns in the United States, large waves of immigrants have come into Europe from war-torn countries in the Middle East. Our point here is not political: We are simply noting that these waves of immigration have created more diverse workforces in many countries. Having staff with different cultural backgrounds and viewpoints impacts how teams go about problem solving in improvement projects. Unquestionably, employees in Western countries have a more diverse approach toward improvement than in the past. In our view, this can have a positive effect on teamwork, but it needs to be effectively managed.
Growth of IT and Big Data Analytics
In 1987, the Internet was in an embryonic stage of development. Today, of course, the Internet is ubiquitous in society, including healthcare, education, and business. Google and Amazon have become major players in the business world, despite having minimal brick-and-mortar facilities. Similarly, the state of information technology (IT) in 1987 is considered antiquated by today’s standards. These developments in IT have led to a rapid expansion of data acquisition, storage, and analysis, a phenomenon commonly referred to as Big Data or data science (Davenport and Patil, 2012). We discuss Big Data analytics in more detail later in this chapter. Do these developments in IT, the Internet, and Big Data have implications for how we should go about continuous improvement? We feel that they clearly do.
Recognition of Uniqueness of Large, Complex, Unstructured Problems
The world has also recognized the need to collectively address large, complex, and unstructured problems. For example, the issue of global climate change cannot be addressed by any one organization or even one country; it is simply too big of an issue. Likewise, addressing emerging pandemics such as Zika, Ebola, or drug-resistant tuberculosis requires a global effort.
In the year 2000, the United Nations announced a set of ambitious development goals, referred to as the Millennium Development Goals (http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/), which require global cooperation to achieve. These goals included such large, complex, unstructured issues as addressing extreme poverty, providing universal access to education, reducing instances of HIV/AIDS, and enhancing the status of girls and women. We further discuss the issue of large, complex, unstructured problems later in this chapter.
Modern Security Concerns
Security has always been a concern for both societies and businesses. However, the origins of Six Sigma predate the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. Before 2001, many people in the United States and some western European counties believed that terrorism occurred only elsewhere, not in their own countries. Since 2001, we have learned that terrorism is a serious concern everywhere; it’s a global problem. Those of us who travel by air realize that we will never go back to the days of casually walking onto airplanes with minimal security delays.
Beyond terrorism, individuals and businesses both have serious security concerns over computer hacking. Providing protection from identity theft has become a billion-dollar industry in the United States alone. Businesses across the globe received a wake-up call on December 18, 2013, in the heart of the Christmas shopping season, when someone hacked into the computer records of the retail giant Target and downloaded more than 40 million credit card numbers (http://money.cnn.com/2013/12/18/news/companies/target-credit-card/). Target spent vast amounts of money doing damage control, including providing free identity theft protection to customers whose numbers were stolen. Of course, the damage to Target’s reputation was even worse. We discuss the issue of security and risk management in greater detail shortly.
Clearly, we live in a very different world—and, most people would say, also a much more dangerous world—than in 1987. How should we think about continuous improvement in such a world? Is Lean Six Sigma the best approach to take for all problems, including large, complex, unstructured problems, such as climate change or the Millennial Development Goals? We argue that a different paradigm is needed to take continuous improvement to a new level in today’s world. We refer to this paradigm as holistic improvement, and we recommend Lean Six Sigma 2.0 as the best methodology based on this paradigm.
Before describing what we mean by holistic improvement in the next chapter, we briefly review the evolution of Six Sigma here and explain what we mean by Lean Six Sigma 2.0.
