Six Sigma is dead, long live Six Sigma

Has Six Sigma lost its relevance?

If I had to rank the list of management fads of this century, I wouldn’t be surprised if Six Sigma gets voted to the top. What was once seen as the foolproof solution to every business problem has now been relegated to a chapter or two in the operations textbooks. This is not something recent. Starting early 2000’s Six Sigma started losing sheen. The decline has been steady since then. This is not an obituary to something that passed away long back. Far from it. In this short read, I will try to explain the fall and try to reason why the fundamentals of Six Sigma are more relevant than ever. Having practiced these techniques for many years, I could think of a few shortcomings.

First, Six Sigma was sold as a panacea, a cure-it-all framework to all management problems. Not every problem needs to go through the Six-Sigma rigor.

Second, the paraphernalia of the ‘belt culture’. While it was an attempt to bring greater clarity to the overall scheme of things, trying to enforce stringent rules for project or role classification, at times, turned out be borderline farcical. The belts also gave it an elitist flavor, which further alienated people.

Finally, majority of practioners, did not embrace the technology developments in process-analysis and transformation.

In the recent years, technologies like ML/AI, automation, process-mining, cloud-computing, blockchains, etc., have all had transformational impact on the way we do things. This led to multiple transformation initiatives that were executed in parallel within the same organization - from the process team, technology team, customer experience team etc., Understandably, this led to chaos and contributed to the irrelevance of the Six Sigma to the transformation agenda. That was a lot of nitpicking!

Before we write it off, let us take a step back. In essence, what Six Sigma tries to do is to delineate and address the root-cause of variation / errors in a well-defined problem using a data-driven approach. It trains you on the tools / techniques that help you achieve this. Essentially, it makes you focus on what matters the most for the objective that you seek to attain. Everything else is built on top of this premise. Pretty commonsensical, right? Seeing it at this level, will make Six Sigma relevant to a lot of use-cases.

Let us take case of digital transformation programs. In this article [1] McKinsey points that the lack of broad and holistic understanding is one of the primary impediments. Some view it as an IT program, some see it as digital marketing or analytics program. What is often lost is the clear and tangible understanding of the impact that the digital solutions could have on the business processes and its eventual impact to ROI of the program.

Next let us understand the reasons for failure in process automation programs. A Forbes article[2] points out the primary reasons why automation programs fail is the lack of clear to-be state, lack of change management and, not surprisingly, automating the wrong processes. An incorrect understanding of the interplay between business-processes, people, and the important key process indicators (KPIs) could lead to investing effort in automating things that might not move the needle.

Finally, a few learnings from the analytics programs that I have watched from proximity. Overzealous business intelligence developers, in an attempt give a comprehensive view of what’s happening, end up creating very complex and crowded dashboards. This often leads to fatigue and inertia from the user and results in the classical case of signal getting lost in a noisy dashboard. There have also been instances where jazzy visualizations get used for the sake of it. In all these cases, adapting the Six Sigma approach could have avoided some of these pitfalls.

The big-picture orientation, having clarity on the right set of metrics, ensuring the robustness of your measurement systems, addressing the right set levers that would bring about the change and ways to sustain the change are all foundational principles of Six Sigma. Someone recently encapsulated the essence of Six Sigma as ‘scientific common sense’. I couldn’t agree more. Once you start seeing it as a philosophy, approach, and an expanding toolset to solve process-problems, things start becoming relevant. Going forward there might not be fancy belt titles or DMAIC milestone reviews, but Six Sigma would have its legacy through the commonsensical and methodical approach to problem solving.

[1] [https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights/the-how-of-transformation](https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights/the-how-of-transformation)

[2][https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2021/10/12/why-process-automation-initiatives-fail-and-how-yours-can-succeed/?sh=55d539683b62](https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2021/10/12/why-process-automation-initiatives-fail-and-how-yours-can-succeed/?sh=55d539683b62)