Re: No Conflict Between Deming's Ideas and Six Sigma

["Rip Stauffer" <rstauffer@mn.rr.com>]

Hello, All,

I enjoyed John McConnell's contribution to this thread a lot. Although I'm 
not a big fan of Mikel Harry, overall, there are a few things he's done that 
I do admire him for, and I think that he has a pretty good general grasp on 
Quality philosophy. He had an interesting article in Quality Progress a few 
years ago wherein he defined Quality using a concept he called 
"entitlement." The article discussed entitlement for all stakeholders 
involved in a system, and then talked about maximum levels of Quality being 
reached when entitlement for all stakeholders (brokers, end-users, 
production workers, processes, stockholders, managers) was optimized. I 
liked it because I thought it nicely summed up a lot of thoughts I had had 
regarding system optimization.

Beyond Harry, though, I'd just like to back up another point John made in 
his contribution. Six Sigma is, unfortunately, often practiced by   hundreds 
of hacks out there whose only exposure to Quality was through Belt training 
conducted at the point of a gun by another hack whose only exposure to 
Quality was through Belt training conducted at the point of a gun, whose 
only...etc. (Rule 4 of the Funnel is alive and well among many of these 
folks!). I have been in serious discussions with some of these people who 
have told me things such as: "Hidden factory is all the mistakes that the 
line workers make and hide from management,""The best measure of center for 
a negatively-skewed data set is the 75th percentile,"and "Systems thinking? 
What's that? Why would anyone need that?" among other things. This Rule 4 
has been exacerbated by the fact that Welch popularized Six Sigma as a 
cost-cutting strategy. Now you can pick up any five books written about Six 
Sigma and find that it's about cutting costs, that it ignores the customer, 
that it's about quality, that it's customer-focused...you name it, it's 
probably been written. Then you have ASQ trying to define a standard for Six 
Sigma (thus leading many to believe that such a standard exists).
That doesn't mean that Six Sigma itself is bad. The "Six Sigma metric 
(process sigma)" is, in my view, fundamentally flawed (although I have found 
DPMO to sometimes be useful in estimating overall defect levels by 
aggregating the continuous and discrete measures together--as long as you 
understand that it is just an estimate, and you base it on knowlede of 
stable processes). The idea of putting together a project that focuses on 
working to uncover key elements of the common cause system, so you can 
improve performance in a process that is stable but not performing where it 
should, is a sound one, I think. Having an improvement-focused project life 
cycle (DMAIC) or methodology to help guide a team through that complex task 
is OK with me, and we've been pretty successful with it. Trying to use the 
project methodology by itself as your whole quality system won't work, and 
it certainly doesn't seem to leave Six Sigma leaders with anything like 
statistical thinking (witness Welch and his minions who adopted "Fire the 
bottom 10 percent every year").

Six Sigma can be practiced by Deming advocates. I think most people in the 
DEN would recognize that I am pretty consistent and enthusiastic in 
attempting to learn and expand the Deming Philosophy. So much so, in fact, 
that I had some misgivings when I left the Navy a few years ago and went to 
work for another long-time friend and follower of Dr. Deming's, Lou Schultz, 
as he was trying to put together his Six Sigma practice. Lou always looked 
at Six Sigma as a vehicle for carrying Quality principles and the philosophy 
to organizations. I think he was right...I've been able to show the Red Bead 
and the Funnel and talk about SoPK with a lot of executives now under the 
umbrella of Six Sigma training and coaching. I've had many people in 
organizations, people who had never heard of Dr. Deming, get very interested 
in the Deming Philosophy and Quality because of video tapes we showed and 
discussions we led in Six Sigma classes.

Best regards to all,

Rip Stauffer
Woodside Quality Solutions LLC
612-916-0197