The Wisconsin Blitz

The Air National Guard Headquarters was having trouble getting Green Belts certified. My Guard Unit needed Green Belts to facilitate events. It was the perfect scenario for a Win-Win...sort of like combining chocolate and peanut butter.

For Headquarters certification program, the Lean Six Sigma Green belts required three improvement events per student:

1. Observe an event
2. Co-facilitate one with an experienced belt
3. Solo facilitate under evaluation

It was a pretty strict requirement, but it was a solid training program and made for some great Green Belts.

There was a lot of interest from individuals wanting a Green Belt. Word had gotten out that getting a Green Belt was a good thing; helpful for promotions, useful for civilian careers, and that it was actually useful training.

The trouble was, there weren’t enough events being held to get all the candidates certified. The “new and improved” program had just been launched and the various units across the country were not fully up to speed on doing improvement events. Unit leaders did not have anyone to run events, so they were not scheduling any.

While folks could get the classroom training, they could not get the events needed to earn their belt.

This is the situation I stumbled upon when I was at Air National Guard HQ (ANG HQ) attending some continuing education classes.

I was the Commander for the Logistics Squadron at my unit back in Wisconsin. From my work in Process Improvement, I’d become the unofficial Black Belt for the Wing. The General in charge had asked me to help promote CPI to the 1,800 unit members. And this led to my own dilemma.

There were only a handful of us at the Wing knew what CPI was. I was a traditional guardsman: meaning I was only there one weekend a month. The rest of the time I was working full-time, taking classes for my doctorate, and teaching part-time. (And I had a family I tried to see once in a while.)

I did not have time to teach CPI classes or preach the gospel of process improvement. And, even if I did, I wasn’t sure how much folks would listen to me. Military personnel are used to seeing initiatives come and go…most are just another flavor of the month. If their minds were to be changed, they needed to see CPI in action. They needed to participate in events. But I couldn’t facilitate enough events to make a dent in their perceptions.

Many of you readers may not remember, but Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups used to have ads where one person was eating peanut butter, another was eating chocolate, and they bump into each other. Bits of chocolate bars go into the peanut butter and peanut butter gets onto the chocolate bar. The two yell at each other “You got chocolate in my peanut butter!” and “You got peanut butter on my chocolate!”?They each try some and, of course, it tastes great.

A moment like that happened with us at ANG HQ. A staff member was complaining about the lack of events, and I was lamenting about not having people for events. We realized we could help each other out; we created something we later dubbed, “The Wisconsin Blitz.”

I reached out to my Senior Leadership. We held a “Value Stream Event” in which the heads of all the divisions identified opportunities for improvement.

ANG HQ reached out to trainees who needed events to get certified and compiled a list of those willing to come to Wisconsin.

Working together we devised a schedule of 11 Improvement Events to be held over 2 weeks. All the events would be facilitated by Belts in training.

The results were outstanding. All 11 scheduled events were run, two of them, an aircraft inspection process, and a fuel cell repair were the biggest events seen to date in the entire Air Force.

Of the trainees: 22 received event training; 8 of those earned their Green Belt certification.

For my Wing, over 100 personnel participated in events, 4 people signed up for Green Belt training, and we established a CPI foothold in the organization.

The Wisconsin Blitz became a model for launching process improvement programs at Air National Guard Wings across the country.

But perhaps the best thing of all…as the 4 volunteers at my unit got trained as Green Belts, I was not the only facilitator on the base.

We took a lose-lose situation and turned it into a win-win.

#quality #lean #leansixsigma #operationalexcellence #processimprovement #totalqualitymanagement #storytelling innovation? #lean #leantraining? #leanthinking