System Thinking vs Six sigma

Sounds like BS opinions from a bunch of academics.

You said – “Whereas systems thinking suggests that organisation sshould change current thinking and practices and instead of focussing on improving the 5% of problems the people they should focus on the 95% the work.”

That what I was calling BS. Six Sigma implementers (there are not many of them, but there are lots of fans of Six Sigma – kind of like football) don’t suggest anything, they change the system. And yes, we have read Deming (your reference to the 95%), Senge (Systems Thinking), …
To come on here with such a pompous proposal is stupid. Go learn Six Sigma from a competent provider (ther are not many of them), work a few projects, pay attention to what is happening with the others in training, and then come back on here with your questions. It will not be the same stupid question you started this thread with.

Tracey,
I tend to agree with Stan on his point of views, but not necessarily that your question was stupid. What you are asking is “is six sigma just hype, and if not, how can I integrate it with systems thinking (if at all).” I find it funny that you would come to a discussion forum for the answers to these questions, since forums are typically about people’s opinions on subjects. Some may say yes, others may say no, all probably have data to back up their opinions. The only data that matters is your data — go get some.
Training you in six sigma will cost your company a few thousand dollars and a few weeks of your time. If that is too much investment to determine if six sigma is hype or not (which it isn’t), and how it integrates with your systems thinking process, then you’ve got bigger fish to fry then trying to get your question answered.
You’re helping your organization make decisions about how it will run for years to come. Get trained, do a project so you see how the tools work, figure out if and how it integrates with whatever you’re currently doing, get the data to prove it, and move forward. It’s pretty plain and simple. Nothing worth having is handed to you on a silver platter.
Ren

Tracey,
Every “buzzword” brings assumptions and limitations, and must be adapted to the user, so I find it best to ask “what do we need to do” then “what tools best suit our agenda”.  Then you can compare tools / programs rather than contrast them – it does not have to be either A (ST) or B (SS).
I have seen little evidence that SS, as generally deployed, is more than a glorified Corrective Action program which enriches consultants who trap you with the mystique of their high price tags.  So my answer is that Six Sigma does not enable a change in management thinking unless your organization chooses to;  in other words, your System Thinkers are probably right – but so what?  pick the tool that suits your agenda.
I advise you save your money and ignore consultants.  [email protected] if you want more detail.

Tracey,
Don’t let Stan get to you.  I don’t know the tenets of Systems Thinking, but I’ve created many systems where none existed and seen the benefits.  Just be sure to have a Strategic Plan with measurable outputs, then design your systems to support the plan.

Hi Tracey
 
You’ve asked a good question and it’s a shame that some of your responses have lacked maturity.
I’ve been doing some work redesigning service organisations and have recently become a huge fan of the systems thinking approach because Six Sigma DMAIC/ improve methodologies and DFSS/ design methodologies – in my opinion – are not extensive enough to cope with changing multiple processes and improving an entire system in one programme. So the approaches are very complimentary.  The systems thinking apporoach has been a fantastic top down approach to identify all the design elements of our new system.  Six Sigma tools have been a great enabler of this.
Also you will find many books are now available which incorporate Six Sigma and lean.
Six Sigma/ Systems thinking are really complimentary… the challenge as always is to find the people with the competence and experience to bring them together so as you can do great things for your clients.

I really don’t think you actually know what Six Sigma is.  The ultimate goal of six sigma is to ingrain a culture of meeting customer’s expectations.  Customers not only reflect external but internal as well.  A common customer in my organization is the CFO who demands increases in revenue or cost abatements.  Six Sigma not only helps us achieve these goals by determining statistically significant factors that leads to desired outcomes but address the acceptance pieice of any change managment ideology.  If you have a good solution but nobody buys into it, you have nothing which is one of the downfalls of system thinkers.

Tracey,
Do let Stan get to you, you will be better for it.
Go back and look at your question – I am a system thinker and I know nothing but opinions about Six Sigma is what your message says.
“Don’t go buying anyone’s answers if your question was for free” – Goose Creek Symphony
What this means is that if you really haven’t spent any time thinking – don’t ask the question. Your lack of thought (from a systems thinker!) is obvious.
Cheers.

Yea yea yea….
…but six sigma is still the best because it has a greek letter in the name and the consultants cost more.
I wonder if “Constrant thinking six lean re-engineering kazain Shainin sigma” would sell?  It could be the program of all things

Tracey
 
I use a systems approach for implementing Six Sigma/lean in my organization.  For more information e-mail me at ‘[email protected]’
 
 

Some emotive thoughts;

“95% of the numbers you need to run a company are unknown and unknowable.” (Deming)
“If you optimise the components of a system, you will suboptimise the whole system, if you optimise the whole system, the components will not be optimised.” (Profit beyond measure – Tom Johnson et al)
Management by results optimises the components of a system at the expense of the system as a whole.
6 sigma is an attempt to convert the systemic approach of Deming into a MBR (6 sigma “projects” etc) approach.
In order to do this, 6 sigma theory needs to be able to utilise “measures of success”. The metrics used are, at best statistically dubious. For example, it is stretching probability theory beyond credibility to suggest that there is any practical relationship between z-score and proportion defective for any real process beyond about 3 sigma from the mean. There is no such thing as a normal distribution in practice.
The reported savings from individual projects seldom add up to overall savings for the organisation, as each project has the potential to create even more expensive problems elsewhere in the system (“Today’s problems come from yesterday’s solutions”)
I have discussed 6 sigma with engineers at GE and Allied Signal, (now Honeywell), and their expressed opinion is that the reported savings from 6 sigma (even from their own projects) are in fact a result of creative accounting.
In general, I think it’s about time someone said “the emperor has no clothes”
P.S To forstall any talk of “you won’t understand unless you have been through 6 sigma training” I have been trained as a 6 sigma black belt!

Tracey, it’s a little bit late, but if you are still around maybe this can help.
First of all, I want to make clear that I am NOT a “formal” six sigma practitioner. I have worked in improvement projects (and still do), but not within a six sigma programme yet. And I am not an expert in System Thinking either, but I try to think allways in terms of the system.
From my perspective, six sigma’s DMAIC is a problem solving methodology, which looks very much like PDCA. And a six sigma programme is a frame to manage the projects.
As you said, if this management is not correctly done, an isolated six sigma project can serve for a loocal improvement with nor significant impact (or even zero or negative impact) on the organization as a whole.
When I found this forum, about two years ago, my first question was “How do TOC and Six Sigma interrelate?”. As you may know, TOC (Theory of Constraints, by Dr Goldratt) is a system approach to improvement. It’s basis is that eny system has a desired output, and that if it is not delivering more of that output it is because there is at least one constraint that limits it. Some phrases like “The cost of a minute lost by the constraint is the cost of a minute lost in the whole organization”, “making the not weakest links stronger will make no improvement in  the strength of the chain” or “The constraints govern the output of your system, wehter you manage them or not” became popular after TOC (well, may be they were popular before too).
TOC has 5 steps for improvement:
1) Identify the constraint.
2) Sqweeze the constraint.
3) Subordinate the whole organization to the constraint.
4) Improve the constraint.
5) If in the process the constraint becomes no longer a constraint, go to point 1. But be careful! It is not just a new constraint. It is a new system! So you must start from scratch again. Do not let Inertia become the constraint.
Another interesting thing to note is that the goal is not to improve one by one the constraints, so you are changing constraints all the time. The goal is to put the constraint where you want, keep it there, and manage it. Swtiching constraints is switching systems, and it is not a good thoing to swithc systems all tha time.
However, TOC does not tell how to do each of these steps. You can use six sigma for that. Imagine a project to “Sqweeze the constraint” or “Subordinate the whole organization to the constraint”. Sonds great, doesn’t it?
Maybe six sigma inside TOC is a good choice if you are implementing ystem Thinking. But it’s just an idea. I don’t know if there are organizations working with such an approach.

Philip Whateley has no clothes

Gabriel.  Pretty interesting the reflections you´ve made out of this stuff.
I recall also having taken part about thirty years ago in an analytical study to provide a variable-in-time resource to three equipments which used it as raw material for the same product, but at a different yield in time rate and with a different resource consumption also. This study  led us to apply some technique whose name we found to be “dynamic programming”(??), which although did not optimize the production of the equipments in the order of their individual levels of “productivity”, it did  it for the group as a whole,  not necessarily filling the capacities of the machines in their order of importance.  Could this example, in a certain way, be compared with the “optimization of a system” without necessarily optimizing its individual components?
By the way, I also recall the comment of an envious pal when I was transferred from the plant office to the corporate office of  the same company :  “Ludwig”,  he told me, ” your promotion´s gonna benefit both areas,  raising the mean intellectual coefficient of them both, though the mean coefficient of the whole company´s gonna keep on bein´ the same” (You caught it?).
Regards.      Ludwig

Did you mean that you got ptommoted from an area where your IQ was below the average (so the average increased after you left) to another area where your IQ was above the average (so the average increased after you got there)?
I assumed that the “corporate office” was full of managers, possibly even with pointy hair, so the answer to that should be obvious.
–McD

Ludwig,
As I said before, I am not an expert in six sigma. And I am not en expert in TOC, DP or LP either (wow! with all this non-expertise I should be promoted!). So I’m afraid I don’t have the right answers to your questions. However, I guess that Goldratt would answer them more or less as follows:
b) (viability of a project): Simulate the performance of the whole system with the status quo and with the expected successful project. Measure the output of the system in both situations. Compare. For example, if you want to improve the productivity and you are assessing the viability of a project to improve the packaging operation, do not focus on the output of the packaging. Focus on how many units you would sell with or without the project implementation. I mean, work inside the black box, measure outside the balck box.
a) (effectiveness of the project) Same as above.
Another interesting poit about TOC: It is ussually missunderstood that, from the TOC perspective, only improvements AT the costraint are worth doing. That’s wrong. The right phrase would be that only improvements FOR the cosntraint are worth doing, AT the constraint or somewhere else. Remember. Not only sqeeze the constraint. Also subordinate the whole organization to the constraint.
For example, a resource that is a supplier of the constraint should be a zero defects supplier. Every product that reaches deffective at the constraint and is processed there is a waste of time for the whole organization. Also the customer of the constraint shuld be a zero defect customer. Every unit that managed to go through the constraint is too valuable to destroy it later. In the book “The haystack syndrome” (By Goldratt) there is avry nice eample of how a process change that INCREASE the whole processing (dock to dock) lead time of a product can actually increase the productivity of the system. Just remove some work from the constrain and do it in another non-botleneck operation, even if that non-bottelneck will do it slower more parts will go through the constriant.
There is a good site for TOC. http://www.rogo.com. Go to CAC (crazy about constraints). In particular, go to the “links” part and look for the link to the DOE section of the Iowa State University. There you will find what is, as far as I’ve seen, the best 10 minutes presentation to learn what is TOC.

Vek,
I honestly hope you are not the author of that article for 2 reasons — 1) if so, this self-aggrandized approach is rather bad form and 2) Sigma bashing is rather passe. I am not certain if you really understand Six Sigma as a methodology.  Six Sigma as a methodology does not claim to have invented new tools.  Rather, Six Sigma is a methodology that has orchestrated the effective and efficient use of these tools. 
In your article, you mention Six Sigma’s reliance upon control charts (and associated theory) and with a rather blatant sense declared that the control limits are bassed on “Three Sigma limits.” In the same blatant sense, you could not be farther than the truth if you tried. First, contril limits are based on plus or minus three standard errors, not Sigmas or standard deviations (plum the depths of your alleged statistical prowess to find the differences between the 3).  Second, the purpose of control charts is to assess stability, not capability. In fact, as a huge prerequisite for capability analysis, the process MUST be in control.  These are the things that Six Sigma programs (okay, I have to qualify this with good Six Sigma programs) impart.  It is a methodology, mapping these individual tools into a whole solution.
In your posting, you state, “Six Sigma is not a good tool for processes that need a radical redesign.” Again, not sure about your understanding of the Six Sigma methodology.  Over time, this need was recognized, and Design for Six Sigma came about.
Now, I do agree with your concern about the surgence of the consultants — these folks know a good gig when they see one, and they flock like vultures to consume the opportunity.  These false prophets actually do more harm than good.
Vek, if you are not the author, then no harm, no foul. If you are, take the time and really see what Six Sigma is all about — look at how the tools map together in the methodology. Most important, do not view Six Sigma as a threat.  If you really do not buy into this, this too is good for me and my Associates in Six Sigma — inevitably, we will have to clean up the messes that you and your like-minded folks have a tendency to make.

This article is a pedantic summary from an ignorant person. Some areas are true, but the base of the article is so incorrect that it invalidates anything else the author has to say. I challenge the author of the article to actually complete Six Sigma training, complete a real Six Sigma project (that delivers significant business results) and then rewrite the article. It will be a different story.

Sorry Dave, I don’t think that about you at all. I’m trying to be a smart a** in to many threads at once. I was talking about Dave over in the thread  Transactional-Long Vs. Short Term Sigma.Sorry, I’ll try to keep my Dave’s straight.

One of the key criticisms of Six sigma by systems thinkers is that six sigma does not challenge the way managers think, it designed to appeal to command and control managers and allows managers to maintain the status quo. Whereas systems thinking suggests that organisation should change current thinking and practices and instead of focussing on improving the 5% of problems the people they should focus on the 95% the work.

I would be interested to know if people see this as a genuine criticism of six sigma or does six sigma enable a change in management thinking- a move away from command and control?
Tracey,
I hope I am understanding your post correctly ..
The goal of the quality system is Assurance of Quality. The Six Sigma program aims at Quality Control (improvement in process making the product, indicates which factors are critical to the outgoing quality of the product, etc.)
Quality System establishes the requirements that guide the day to day activity of the organization – example : Identification and Traceability of product, Specifications, CAPA, Document and Record Control, etc. Six Sigma requires you to have a structured approach to problem solving – DMAIC. Some organizations may require that you use all tools learned for belt certification.
Having said that – Any organization starting Six Sigma program should  require that the Managers play a key role in this. They should want the managers to undergo belt training or provide a Sponsor training at the very least to them. Most of the Six Sigma projects should be sponsored by these managers and belts should be accountable to these managers at each stage of completion. Todays’ organization can not hold status quo as a good part of the profit may come from cost improvements and not increase in product prices. Todays’ organization needs to be a Customer Centric Continually Improving company. Within this framework, a Six Sigma program can coexist with a TOC, Lean, etc.  helping the continual improvement of the product quality and the Quality System. Bottomline – $$ 
I firmly believe that those days of the Command and Control management styles are behind us. Management needs an empowered workforce and focus on 100% quality. If getting that done requires to be on the band wagon called ‘Six Sigma’ – even better.
Good luck.
PB

I got introduced to six sigma and highly recommend this honey.It sweetens perfectly and heals naturaly.Six sigma is one of the best change management domains available to man that has potential for universal applications.Inherent in six  sigma is system thinking principles and plenty of quantitative analysis ,if not calculus.
Since this domain is under constraction,there is differences of opinion.Like they say Do a project and let the Data do the talking.You are an inspiration person,thats your worth.

Brandon
Stop your nonsense and your silly comments,please
Where are your A/V comments in all that? 

Maria,You win the dufus of the day award. Replying to a 5 1/2 year old post!I went back and reviewed the string of posts and the comment stands
as accurate. And I was nicer than I should have been to that Philip
Whateley guy.Come on back when you have something to contribute.

Easy to tell who is getting the check and who is giving the check………Priceless