His question caused me to pause. In the past, our firm has been asked to pick up the pieces after some ineffective attempts to implement Lean Six Sigma. As a result, we certainly can point to some case studies of what not to do. But it is thought- provoking to find the underlying themes in these “worst practice” examples. Here are our top three candidates:

One more “rock in the pack”. If you are not familiar with the rock in the pack analogy, it originates from a story about an unmotivated manager who felt that his job was to handle an endless series of problems. Since nothing was ever completely resolved his work felt like carrying a load of meaningless rocks. Another assignment became just one more rock in the pack.

If Lean Six Sigma simply becomes an additional assignment to middle managers, without displacing something else, it can become a rock. Too often the message is “you need to improve safety, quality, costs, market share, efficiency and customer satisfaction – oh, and by the way, fully implement Lean Six Sigma”. In this situation it is easy to know which of those assignments will get the least attention. It would have been much simpler to say “here’s another rock”.

Allowing Lean Six Sigma to become just one more task is almost a guaranteed way to fail. On the other hand, the successful approach is for Lean to become the method to accomplish business objectives. This also positions Lean properly within the organization. After all, no company has (or should have) the mission statement to achieve Lean Six Sigma excellence. An appropriate mission is some combination of serving customers, providing innovative and quality products, satisfying stakeholders, making a profit and so forth. The rightful role of Lean Six Sigma is as the system to accomplish this.

Using this logic the message to managers is not to simply add Lean onto the list of things to do – but to utilize Lean methods to achieve the measurable business objectives.

Focus on the mechanics. Many of the Lean tools and techniques can be taught fairly quickly - but using those tools to actually transform the business is much, much harder. A good example is Value Stream Maps. A team can be taught the mechanics of VSMs in a few hours and can create one in a day or less of effort. However, using the current state VSM as a starting point and then actually driving improvement is much more difficult.

We believe one of the greatest signs of failure is a company that has attractive VSMs posted in all areas – but no improvement resulting from them. Other Lean tools (changeover reduction, TPM, visual control, Kanban, etc) have a similar story. Training is the simple part – leading the organization to actually change is the management challenge.

Too much delegation. Let’s be clear, some delegation is OK and an organization where everything must have extensive upper management involvement has bigger problems than just Lean. But leadership is important and people look to upper management to “walk the walk”.

An example of too much delegation comes from a plant where we did some Lean education, including an overview of 5S. The general manager was so enthused about the impact 5S could have that he wanted to set a personal example. To accomplish that goal he authorized his executive assistant to work Saturday overtime to 5S his office for him.

Do you suppose that sent a positive message to the organization? Of course not! The message that quickly spread around the plant was that management felt 5S was not worth their personal involvement. It took quite a bit of damage control to recover from that case of over-delegation.

Unfortunately, there are probably many more failure modes than the three mentioned here. But a well thought-out approach, such as the Three Year Lean Six Sigma plan we advocate, will avoid many of these problems.

To learn more about this please consider downloading our newest white paper “Lean Six Sigma: Accelerating and Achieving the Real Potential of Lean”. In the paper our founder, Mike Donovan, explains how to achieve measurable bottom-line results and jumpstart your Lean initiative. Click on the link to download your copy of “Lean Six Sigma: Accelerating and Achieving the Real Potential of Lean". You are also welcome to browse the list of free white papers and other articles at Free Resources.

We are interested in how you stimulate critical thinking and process improvements in your organization. Please visit our blog to add your comments by following the link: Our Blog.

Finally, if you have a topic that you would like addressed, or an Insight you would like to pass along, e-mail us at: Jack.Rink@rmdonovan.com

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