Lean Six Sigma and Deming’s 14 points (p14)

The last point.

“Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everybody’s job.”

Sending individuals to Lean Six Sigma training and then telling them to do well, without any business system to support them does not meet the intent of this point.

The top Lean Six Sigma (LSS) programs have gone beyond this model. These programs, such as our Integrated Enterprise Excellence (IEE) system teach you to set up an infrastructure of support along with a business system that engages the entire organization into improvement. The great programs start with the mission and vision statements. Use the skills to build superior performance measures and reporting structures, such as scorecards that balance the performance areas while avoiding the simplistic Red/Yellow/Green format many of us see.

These performance measures indicate where performance is failing to meet goals, which then pulls for strategies to be created to improve the performance only where gaps are found. These strategies flow down into the key projects that are needed to improve.

In this scenario, everyone, from the executives to the workforce are provided good performance measures and scorecards. They are all engaged in improving the business performance and Deming’s last point is realized.

In short, you should not implement an improvement system that is just about solving problems with projects, these always make some gains and the die out. Do it right and engage the entire business system into driving a transformation to an improved state of performance.

You may think that Lean programs do this because of the pervasive 5S training of the workforce and the very high number of Kaizen improvement efforts get everyone working. If you goal is to get action, it will meet that goal. But they will not engage the entire organization in transformation unless the efforts are clearly tied to performance needs that were translated into strategies (measure then set strategies) Any other improvements outside of these key strategies are just feel good efforts that may not help the enterprise.

You may have heard the football quote “If you are not keeping score, then it is just practice”. I will wrap up my Deming 14 points with a modification of this quote.

“If the improvement effort does not address a known enterprise performance gap, it was just a practice effort”

Good luck in your improvements!