Back in 2021 I took a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt certification class. It’s been five years since I took that class, and I haven’t completed my Green Belt project to become an official Green Belt, but that wasn’t really my goal at the time (and, frankly, it’s still not a priority of mine, even though I still want to get my official Green Belt at some point). I took the class in the spirit of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, specifically “Seek first to understand, then be understood.” A few years earlier we had hired a new CFO at our organization who came from GE and had extensive experience with Lean Six Sigma. Our Senior Leaders, who I was working with on a regular basis, were being taught about DMAIC and how it could apply at our company, and as I was one of the key figures in determining how we executed on strategic initiatives I figured it was important for me to understand what was being taught to the folks I was working with.
I learned a lot when I took that class. I learned that Lean Six Sigma was predominantly used in manufacturing, specifically in finding ways to eliminate waste and reduce defects. I learned that Lean Six Sigma was not a Project Management framework, even though when someone attempts to improve a process using DMAIC it is referred to as a project. As someone who absolutely loves data, I was enamored by how much Lean Six Sigma practitioners rely on data analysis to achieve their goals. I learned that Lean Six Sigma was not anti-Agile, and that if done properly the two methodologies could easily work together and produce some spectacular results.
The most valuable lesson I learned, however, is about what I perceive to be a misperception around Lean Six Sigma. I heard, and was myself convinced, that it was a soulless way of looking at human labor. That it was very Taylorist in that it treated people as cogs in a machine, and that if they just did exactly what they were supposed to do and followed the right process everything would be perfect.
What I learned instead was that, in the Lean Six Sigma world, “People are never the problem. Your process is.”
What this meant, according to my instructor, was that if people were not following a process, it was because they were incentivized not to do so. That circumventing all or part of a process served their needs better than following that process. That, in most cases, people want to do a good job and do not avoid a process because they are bad actors. They do so because not following the process makes their lives easier in some way.
In other words, having good processes is incredibly important, but if you didn’t focus your efforts on serving the people who are meant to execute them, they were bound to fail.
Sounds kind of familiar from an Agile perspective, doesn’t it? Individuals and Interactions over processes and tools anyone?
I saw this play out during a senior leader meeting a few years ago. We were reviewing our homegrown enterprise work management process, and we were looking for input on how to improve it. We had printed out flowcharts that detailed all the steps required to get an initiative through the complete lifecycle at our organization. Our new VP of Application Development (so new that he had not “officially” started and had flown down just to take part in this summit), held up the piece of paper and folded it in half so that the start and end points were touching. “If I can do this,” he said, “and get my projects done without going through all of these steps…why wouldn’t I?”
He was right. It was possible to get projects done without going through all those steps, and in many cases a leader did so they were able to get things done faster than by going through them. I won’t go into the reasons why he was right in this post for a variety of reasons, but he very much was.
People are complex. I often catch myself saying that people are messy, but that’s putting a negative spin on the outlook and I try not to do that. Human beings are unpredictable, because we’re all unique. As individuals our actions and beliefs are shaped by innumerable experiences we have had throughout our lives, up until the very moment we are in at any given time. One person might be having a bad day because they spilled their morning cup of coffee, while another person might be having a great day because they thought about someone who did something nice for them twenty years ago. We’re a beautiful and chaotic mix that has been thrown into a blender and turned on to puree to make us what we are today.
No process in the world is ever going to account for that.
That does not, however, mean we shouldn’t try to optimize our processes. Quite the opposite! Part of the spirit of continual improvement is that we should constantly be looking at the ways we work and exploring ways to make them better! Lean Six Sigma is an amazing, data-driven tool that can help you do that. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it’s entirely possible to turn the outcome of an Agile Retrospective into a Lean Six Sigma DMAIC project.
Just don’t forget the people along the way.