Kaizen Training for Yellow Belts

Six Sigma Yellow Belts are in the front line of any quality deployment program in a commercial organisation. The candidates are typically junior personnel who perform critical work tasks at the “coal-face” of the business, whether on a production line, in a call centre, or behind a shop counter.

If a company is envisaged as an inverted pyramid, then these are the “critical many”: staff who have direct contact with the end-customer. The entire weight of the company’s brand, reputation and ability to deliver quality may hinge on the success of this customer interface. There is little point in carefully cultivating brand reputation through sophisticated and expensive above-the-line advertising if a customer is faced with surly operatives or shoddy attention to detail at the actual point of customer contact.

Hence training these vital employees in quality principles of continuous improvement can have a powerful multiplier effect on the business. Six Sigma Yellow Belt learning is not theoretical but grounded in practical experience. If combined with a rigorous and sustained commitment to developing ongoing improvements to processes, scripts and systems, the cumulative effect can be profound.Kaizen of course is the philosophy and practice of just such continuous improvement. This hub explains how it can form the heart of your Six Sigma Yellow Belt training program.

“Plan, Do, Check, Act” – The four simple imperatives of “PDCA” constituted the original Shewhart Cycle, and Deming later refined this more accurately as “Plan, Do, Study, Act”. This concept of a structured approach to problem solving can of course be applied in any environment, and at both an operational and strategic level.

The military corollary of OODA, or Observe, Orient, Decide and Act, provides a framework for fast tactical response to any fluid or evolving situation. The key to the effectiveness of this approach is accurate filtering of data to identify the “vital few” factors, and the selection of appropriate responses to each challenge or threat. The ability to process information quickly and accurately, in conditions of uncertainty where quantitative analysis may not be available, is pivotal here.

In a project management context where immediate decision making and response are not essential, the best systemic formulation is the “Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Control” or DMAIC loop. This will use more formal analytical tools to identify root causes of problems and apply suitable improvements.

A key insight of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) is that “the map is not the territory”. This will come as no surprise to those who have studied a flowchart or desk procedure of a business process and then compared it to the actual process in action. People tend to have mental maps, or heuristic models, based on a synthesis of past experience and unquantifiable emotions and feelings. These mental short-cuts are useful but it is important to understand their limitations. Yellow Belts should be self-aware when it comes to fuzzy logic and unverified assumptions, both of which can adversely impact business performance.

A useful logical device that forces people to approach problems critically is the “Five Whys” technique. This Japanese management technique simply repeats the question “Why?” five times in succession to ascertain the real root causes behind any problem or issue. The childlike simplicity of this approach is surprisingly effective when dealing with apparently intractable problems.

This is where “zero-based thinking” is essential in kaizen training.This approaches everything with a simple yet powerful question – if we were designing this process or system or scratch, what is truly essential? The concept of designing systems around essential irreducibility is a good one and in line with the philosophical principle of Occam’s Razor i.e. that the simplest, sharpest solution is invariably the best.

Total quality management (TQM) ideas swept the world in the 1980s as an offshoot of the Toyota Production System and the global success of Japanese lean manufacturing ideas. The famous “quality circle”, whereby workers collaborate to devise and implement quality improvement ideas in their own area of expertise, was an important innovation of this period.

A certain wariness of self-proclaimed external experts can be useful. In my own commercial experience, the most useful and relevant ideas for lasting improvements came from the operating teams themselves. Just as a personal change such as giving up smoking has to come from within, so too does lasting behavioural change at work.

It is this cultural aspect of quality change that is the most elusive, yet ultimately the most critical, to attaining world-class quality. Deming himself realised that success depended not on targets imposed on the workforce, but rather from a deep inner culture of quality. He famously argued: "Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership."

Yes there is a risk; that employee power may be hard to control, that excessive expectations will be raised and resentment generated if ideas are not adopted. Yet the benefits outweigh the risks. A collaborative group focus on internal failure costs (of rework and internal testing) as well as external ones (e.g. warranties and customer returns) will yield dividends.

It should be remembered that in most organisations, the “hidden factory” of internal failure costs often exceeds the profit margin. There is all to play for.

The business environment is a fluid and predatory place. Like tsunamis, profound structural trends can develop unseen below the waterline and by the time the wave breaks, it is too late. Moore’s Law (1965) accurately predicted the doubling of computer processor power every two years and has become a metaphor for relentless and exponential change.

The most compelling feature of the information revolution is acceleration – of cycle times, competitive shifts and social trends. Anyone who has followed the dramatic rise of Google of Facebook to global prominence will understand the criticality of network effects and tipping points in the modern business environment.

Environmental scanning needs to be a continuous, dynamic and grass-roots process. As Six Sigma Yellow Belts are customer-facing, they are at the cutting edge of the business and its problems. As should be the first port of call for identifying and assessing trends and their significance.

Strategy should be sourced at grass roots level and driven up the organisation chimneys. Ideas need to be generated and fostered at the "coal-face" level through pilots, side-projects and internal wikis and social networks. This is why progressive and innovative organisations such as Google actively encourage employees to spend time on their own side projects.They even give a name to it - "20 per cent time". In the flattened, decentralised and empowered world that the digital revolution has created, new ideas can originate in the unlikeliest of places and then spread like wildfire.

This strikes me as a departure from the relentless elimination of "slack" and the optimisation of all processes in a lean production paradise. Maybe the kaizen Yellow Belt experts of tomorrow will be creative pioneers, looking for space and time to generate "profound knowledge" - kaizen ideas that contribute lasting value to the business.