Seduce Them With Success
In 50 Words or Less:
What: Six Sigma fails over half the time.
Why: Poor implementation that doesn’t understand the science of change.
How: The science of complexity and networks, and research into how cultures adopt, adapt or reject change suggest ways to improve implementation to maximize results, minimize costs, and accelerate the adoption of Six Sigma.
Where else: Implementation of any type of change
The prevailing wisdom in the Six Sigma community suggests that you must first get top management commitment before you can initiate or succeed at Six Sigma. What if everything we’ve been led to believe about this first commandment of quality is wrong? In this article I’ll argue that what many consider to be the “first step” toward Six Sigma is not only wrong, but dangerous. While most will point to the success of GE or other big companies that started with top management commitment, this often overlooks the other 50 percent of companies that started with commitment and failed (Quality Digest, 2004). This puts the implementation of Six Sigma at a one-sigma failure rate.
Who benefits the most from this "first step" of getting top management commitment? Big consulting firms that need top level commitment to open up the corporate checkbook.
While Six Sigma gains its power from investigating and resolving linear cause-effects, culture change is a decidedly non-linear phenomenon. This leads us to investigate existing research into how cultures change and recent explorations into the science of networks and complexity. This investigation reveals surprising, counterintuitive insights into how to succeed with Six Sigma. Furthermore, these findings can be applied to any culture change, not just Six Sigma.
What’s Wrong With Six Sigma?
First, there’s nothing wrong with the methods or tools. They work just fine on the class of problems they are designed to solve—linear ones. The real problem is implementation. According to Quality Digest’s annual survey, over 50% of companies are abandoning Six Sigma after about three years. These are companies that followed the prescriptions of top management commitment and extensive training of black and green belts. This is not surprising considering that, according to BusinessWeek, one-third of CEOs change jobs every three years.
Florida Power and Light, for example, won the Deming Prize for Quality back in 1989. A change in CEOs in the mid-90s, however, killed their quality program. And now another change in leadership is bringing it back. Can you really afford to hitch your quality wagon to one leadership team?
The Stalinist Limit
The science of complexity considers corporate cultures to be complex adaptive systems (CAS). By complex they mean non-linear, wildly interconnected agents following simple rules from which amazingly complex higher-level organization emerges. From complexity comes the butterfly effect—a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can raise a tornado in Texas. This idea that small changes can have huge effects and that huge changes can have no effect at all flies in the face of Six Sigma’s focus on linear cause-effects.
One such finding involves the power of top leadership commitment. “The folk model of organization as top-down and centralized is out of date,” says Sidney Winter, a Wharton economist who served as the chief economist at the General Accounting Office. This top-down, commitment-equals-success approach invokes what complexity scientists call the “Stalinist Limit”—the corporate commitment to Six Sigma is either on or off. Six Sigma can flip on and off again like a firefly on a hot summer night. If you’ve been in a company that had top commitment and then flipped when a new CEO arrived or the business climate changed, you’ve experienced this shift.
The other finding is that the Stalinist Limit encourages the system to settle for less than optimal results and freeze into this unchanging state. The wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling approach to Six Sigma undertaken by most companies flies in the face of Juran’s “vital few, trivial many” rule. Too many teams end up working on projects of little or no value, which reduces the value of the teams that really find the hidden gold mines in the business.
When we point to Jack Welch and GE as a Six Sigma success, we often fail to consider Jack’s 20-year effort to create a culture of change at GE. He had already cleared the fields and tilled the soil to make it ready for the seed of Six Sigma. I, on the other hand, worked in the phone company, which had a long-standing commitment to staying the same. Five years of effort to implement Six Sigma’s predecessor, TQM, using the conventional wisdom—top management commitment, tons of training and lots of teams—failed miserably.
“In a Stalinist regime, the system may typically settle determinedly onto a very poor compromise solution and then remain there rigidly,” says Stuart Kauffman. In essence, by getting the top leader to commit, you limit your results and reduce your chances of success to 50/50 right out of the starting gate. And it’s a very fragile success. The entire system is less stable than if you allow Six Sigma to emerge from the corporate quilt, one patch at a time.
The Power of Patches
Kauffman says: “Breaking an organization into ‘patches’ where each patch attempts to optimize for its own selfish benefit which can lead, as if by an invisible hand, to the welfare of the whole organization.” The basic idea is simple: “divide the organization into a quilt of nonoverlapping patches.” The joint effect achieves optimal results for the whole quilt.
Complex adaptive systems allow higher levels of order and complexity to arise from building blocks of lower level, seemingly chaotic behavior. By encouraging Six Sigma to take root and grow in a few key patches and spread to neighboring patches, you can create a more stable environment for Six Sigma. I call this the crawl-walk-run approach to Six Sigma.
To succeed at Six Sigma we have to shift our attention from top management commitment because it invokes the Stalinist Effect—guaranteed failure 50% of the time.
People Aren’t Machines
The culture inside a business isn’t a linear one. The typical hierarchy chart shows the formal organization, but doesn’t begin to show all of the informal communication links between individuals. These networks look like wildly interconnected hubs and spokes.
Research into cultures has shown that these networks are more like the airlines, with hubs in certain places and spokes that radiate out to smaller and smaller ports. These informal networks are the real power behind culture change. You’ll find that Betty in purchasing or John in accounting are the experts that everyone turns to for insights about that part of the business. These are the informal leaders—the hubs in the culture’s networks. These are the true leaders and the ones that survive CEO turnover. CEOs may come and go, but these people remain and steer the business toward success or failure.
The Tipping Point
In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell presents the argument that changes tip into the mainstream consciousness because of these hubs. He calls them connectors, mavens and salespeople. Connectors get their power from linking people with other people. Mavens (experts) get their power from connecting people with knowledge. Salespeople do it for money. Seth Godin, in the Ideavirus, calls them sneezers—people who infect the population by sneezing the idea to other people. These opinion leaders can make or break the implementation. In essence, we had the right idea—get commitment of the leaders, but we focused on the wrong leaders: the formal ones, not the informal ones.
Insight #1: The messenger matters. Jack Welch helped tip Six Sigma into corporate boardrooms. Why? Not because he was a CEO, but because he was one of the well respected, informal leaders in the CEO community. If you want Six Sigma to tip into your corporate culture, get the commitment of the informal leaders, not the formal ones.
How do you identify the sneezers in your organization? Ask a few people: “Who’s the expert on (orders, purchasing, or whatever)?” You’ll get one of two answers: “I don’t know, but John would know who the experts are.” (John’s a connector.) Or, “Betty’s the expert.” (Betty’s a maven.) How do get their buy-in? Use John’s connections to find the right team of mavens to work on your initial pilot projects. Enrich Betty’s expertise by bringing her up to speed on Six Sigma.
How Cultures Adopt, Adapt or Reject Change
In The Diffusion of Innovations, Everett Rogers describes over 50 years of research into how cultures adopt, adapt, or reject innovations like Six Sigma, the Ipod or cell phones. The diffusion of an idea is a social process, not one that you can legislate. The success of any innovation involves early adopters, the majority and laggards.
The early adopters will embrace Six Sigma because it’s new. The majority will want proof that it works in their business. And the laggards will try to kill it before it gets started. Launching a corporate-wide Six Sigma implementation often stirs up the laggards before you are ready for them.
According to Rogers, the rate at which employees adopt any change like Six Sigma can be adjusted in several key ways. Each of these can raise or lower the stickiness of the change and the idea more sneezy (easy to sneeze):
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While these five stickiness variables make up 49 to 87 percent of the rate of adoptions, there are a few other variables involved: the type of decision (top-down or word-of-mouth), the network, the social system, and the change agent’s promotion.
According to Rogers, top-down is a faster way of starting the change, but “authority decisions may be circumvented during their implementation.” Word-of-mouth is the next fastest way and minimizes the risk of rejection.
Oddly enough, the more people who have to decide to adopt Six Sigma, the slower the rate of adoption.
Insight #2: Reduce the number of people involved to accelerate the rate of adoption. Start small with a few key pilot projects (patches) staffed with early adopters, sneezers and an experienced guide. Make them successful. Then do the next round of projects. Adapt Six Sigma to your business as you learn. Do another round or two and you’ll hit critical mass. Then Six Sigma will pull its way through the business, you won’t have to push it.
Crossing the Chasm
Geoffrey Moore found that there is a chasm between the early adopters and early majority. While you may enjoy early success, Six Sigma may never jump the chasm to become part of your company’s mainstream way of doing business. The keys to the chasm are your sneezers. They’ll convince the early majority, if anyone can. Make sure you have plenty of success stories and case studies to show them how it works in your business.
Creating a Six Sigma Epidemic
Six Sigma is an idea that needs to reach epidemic proportions to convert a culture. Epidemics don’t start big; they start small and grow slowly, then exponentially. The keys to growing an ideavirus like Six Sigma involve three key elements: contagiousness, the butterfly effect, and the tipping point.
Contagiousness: Six Sigma and DMAIC are more repellant than contagious. The names and acronyms turn off most people. To make Six Sigma take root and grow in your corporate culture, you’ll want to find ways to make it more sticky, sneezy and contagious.
When people ask me what I do, I don’t say Six Sigma; I say: “I work with companies that want to plug the leaks in their cash flow,” which invariably stimulates interest.
Insight #3: The message matters. “There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible,” says Gladwell.
The Butterfly Effect: Little causes can have big effects. If the hubs in your company feel stupid about Six Sigma, their whisperings will kill Six Sigma. If you try to implement Six Sigma wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling, you’ll end up majoring in minor things focused on the trivial many, not the vital few.
Simple changes in how you introduce Six Sigma will have big effects in how it is received. Who are the sneezers in your company? How can you make the connectors more connected, the mavens better experts, and the salespeople more money?
The Tipping Point: “is the moment of critical mass,” says Malcolm Gladwell. According to Rogers, cultures reach critical mass when between 10- to 25-percent of the members have adopted the change. This research also found that when as little as five percent of the workforce adopts a change, it will persist.
Insight #4: Engage your sneezers. If you’re interested in starting a word-of-mouth idea epidemic like Six Sigma, focus on the sneezers. No one else matters.
Seduce Them With Success
Many years ago I had to convince an IT department’s systems analysts to switch from using a typing pool to doing their own word processing. Some wanted to jump right in; others wanted nothing to do with it. I catered to the early adopters and let them convince their cohorts.
I see the same thing happening in a few companies that once had a quality system, but had it dismantled by a new CEO. To reintroduce the improvement methods and tools, they haven’t announced a big Six Sigma effort because they know they’d be laughed out of town. Instead the change agents are going around, talking to operational managers, finding out their problems and offering to help solve them. Then, using the tools of Six Sigma, they find remarkable, unexpected solutions that reduce costs and increase speed and profitability. Oddly enough, the people on those improvement teams seem to know how to continue solving problems. And they tell their coworkers. And the operational manager’s success makes his or her colleagues curious. Then the Six Sigma change agent gets a call to help another manager solve a problem. And so it goes until the Six Sigma system is operating well in the mission-critical elements of the business.
Want Six Sigma to succeed in your company? Use what I call the crawl-walk-run method. Start small with a few key sneezers. Make them successful. Make it easy for them to tell their improvement story to other people (i.e., make it sneezy). Expand into the next tier of problems. Keep going until you reach a critical mass. Let the word-of-mouth power of the critical mass pull Six Sigma through the business. It will take less time, cost less money, and deliver greater returns than you can possibly imagine. It’s not the road most companies take, but it’s a better road to follow whether you’re implementing Six Sigma for the first time or just trying to restart a culture change that has failed.
Read more:
Kauffman, Stuart, At Home In the Universe, Oxford Press, 1995.
Gladwell, Malcolm, The Tipping Point, Little Brown, NY, 2002.
Godin, Seth, Unleashing the Ideavirus, Hyperion, NY, 2001.
Rogers, Everett, Diffusion of Innovations (4th), Free Press, NY, 1995.
Moore, Geoffrey, Crossing the Chasm, Harper Business, NY, 1999.
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Jay Arthur, the KnowWare Man, works with companies that want to plug the leaks in their cash flow. He is the author of?Agile Process Innovation,?Lean Six Sigma Demystified,?Lean Six Sigma for Hospitals. and?QI Macros? for Excel.