De los focos de la peste

consulting firm practice leaders, I contacted the North American Senior VP of Quality, whom I had met during the demonstration project phase. We met at U.S. headquarters the day of the public announcement that the Lean Six Sigma deployment had delivered over $450 million of savings. The Canadian regional quality director was busy hand delivering nine-inch cast iron desktop flying pigs to all full-time Six Sigma resources, so it was hard for senior leaders to believe that the Green Belt program could be in difficulty when the balance of the program worked so well.

He asked me aquestion that surprised me: “Why are you the one telling me this?” My candid answer was that I was the one telling him about the difficulties of the Green Belt program because I was on the frontline able to see them as it was developing—and because I could. As an external consultant focused on delivering training sessions, I had the freedom from political or career consequences to look objectively and speak about what worked and what did not. I could see it happen across the board. It was not a problem tied to a specific project leader or plant. It was a systemic problem that needed a systemic solution.

In addition to project status data from the three plants I was working with, I had brought a copy of the only peer-reviewed published academic article on the Green Belt training and

deployment process (Bourg et al., 2010). The first 12 words of the abstract, “With 300 Green Belt trained but business results not delivered as targeted…,” made my case that this systemic problem went beyond CPG and was a well known problem, but not yet well resolved. The Agilent Technologies case (Bourg et al., 2010) was considered a success after a long, involved intervention raised certification levels there from zero to 9%.

An engaged research approach to developing a core solution addressing common problems could be deployed across the 48 North American plants. I left the meeting after suggesting that the VP of Quality ask his staff to report on the Green Belt program—not on numbers of Green Belt trained, but on number of projects completed, stable process

improvements, dollars saved, and certified Green Belts. He conferred with his team and then called me the next day and approved the project. Even though it had been many years since he had earned his doctorate, he understood the scholarly scope of my request to use the site and the business transformation context for research and he graciously granted his support.

While we awaited the completion of the formal approval process, we began to contact internal subject matter experts, with mixed results. When we shared details of the redesign project, a very experienced, very successful, and extremely well respected internal deployment thought leader replied, “Green Belt? This is sh*t. We know it’s sh*t. This sh*t does not work. Everybody knows it. This sh*t is a waste of time. We’re better off hiring Black Belts.”

My intent was to study organizational learning, but the immediate business need was to design a learning intervention to address the bottleneck of stalled and abandoned Green Belt

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projects while training new cohorts of candidates. While we executed the original data collection and analysis plan, designing an intervention became the focus of the second phase of the study. Having established that the experience of the Mont-Royal plant was representative of the

experiences of the other plants, we decided to focus the research project team on a small team of very motivated local actors.

I returned to the Mont-Royal plant and met with the plant leader to share the news. He replied, “Please tell me you are not going to use Six Sigma to figure this out!” I spent 12 weeks on site over a four-month period during which we exploited the data I had collected during the previous year. We supplemented that data with in-depth, face-to-face interviews with Green Belt project leaders and project team members. Even though we were well versed in the literature on iBPI and Lean Six Sigma methods and projects, the interview protocol was developed to build process models of the actual Green Belt project leadership processes.

We began with a sample of 12 members from the first four cohorts, according to project results (very successful, average, and unsuccessful) and level of Green Belt project leaders (frontline and mid-management). Mapping their process histories led us to interview their Black Belt coaches and occasionally their project champions or a key team member to complete the picture. We later coded the interview transcripts according to the 4I feed-forward process. We conducted several meetings with sub-teams representing various stakeholder groups to validate our findings, identify opportunities, and develop learning interventions together.

As we completed our recommendations, important leadership changes happened at the corporate and regional levels. The company was preparing to spin off one third of its assets as a separate business and leadership teams were preparing for a complete reorganization. Access to

consulting resources was suspended until some strategic decisions were made public. Regarding our recommendation, the decision was made to implement a part of the intervention focused on a simplified curriculum for upcoming Green Belt cohorts and to freeze other changes until further notice.

III.II.iii Phase 3: Organizational learning—100% research. Having met my