This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
A New Paradigm Is Needed
The proceeding discussion shows that Lean Six Sigma, even in its more modern form of Version 1.3, is not sufficient to address today’s business improvement needs. We have reached the point noted by Kuhn (1962): Too many problems remain unaddressed by Lean Six Sigma 1.3 to ignore. For example, Lean Six Sigma was never intended as a means of managing modern business risks, integrating the power of Big Data analytics, or addressing large, complex, unstructured problems that cannot be solved in three to six months.
Lean Six Sigma does not incorporate simpler methods, such as Work-Out or Nike projects.
Lean Six Sigma does not guide routine process control efforts or provide an overall quality management system.
A new paradigm, or way of thinking about improvement, is required to make significant progress going forward.
Fortunately, Six Sigma is excellent at what it was designed to do: solve medium-size “solution unknown” problems. Version 1.3 also incorporates innovation efforts, new product and process design, and Lean concepts and methods. Furthermore, the supportive infrastructure developed for Six Sigma is, in our view, the best and most complete continuous improvement infrastructure developed to date (Snee and Hoerl, 2003). Therefore, if this same infrastructure can be applied to a holistic version of Lean Six Sigma that addresses the limitations noted earlier, the resulting improvement system would be the most complete to date.
As already noted, addressing all these limitations would not be a minor upgrade, but rather would require a fundamental redesign based on a much broader paradigm. In other words, it would be Version 2.0, not simply Version 1.4. What paradigm would be required to develop Lean Six Sigma 2.0? In our view, the answer is clear: We need a holistic paradigm of improvement. By holistic, we mean a system that is not based on a particular method, whether it is Six Sigma, Lean, Work-Out, or some other method. Development would need to start with the totality of improvement work needed and then create a suite of methods and approaches that would enable the organization to address all the improvement work identified.
Note that a holistic paradigm would reverse the typical way of thinking about improvement. Traditionally, books, articles, and conference presentations on improvement focus on a particular method and promote that method over others, at least for specific types of problems. For example, it is easy to find books on Six Sigma, Lean, or TRIZ. However, very few, if any, books focus on general improvement. With a holistic paradigm, on the other hand, the focus is not on methods, but on the improvement work—that is, on the problems to be solved. Only after the problems have been identified and diagnosed are methods brought into discussion. The individual methods can then be applied to the specific problems for which they are most appropriate. Holistic improvement is essentially tool agnostic: The tools are hows, not whats. Improvement is our what, the focus of our efforts.
