If you work for any well-sized company priding itself on product quality and service, you’ve surely been exposed to Six Sigma or Continuous Improvement (Kaizen) in some way, shape or form.

Maybe you’ve experienced inspirational speakers challenging you to reveal possible “pain points” of the work process. Possibly you’ve been assigned to work with colleagues in “Quality Circles” to identify problems and offer solutions. Or, perhaps you hit the jackpot and your new “Black Belt” boss was hired to “reengineer” the organization. You even may have endured until either the boss was promoted or your job was eliminated.

Six Sigma dates back to the 1920’s when Walter Shewhart demonstrated that three standard deviations (sigma) from the mean of a normal distribution curve is the point where a process requires correction. Continuous Improvement emerged in Japan as that country revolutionized manufacturing quality and efficiency through the 1960’s and 1970’s. In the 1980’s Motorola found success and coined the Six Sigma moniker. American business leaders praised Six Sigma and companies embraced it as a way of doing business. Manufacturing companies, in particular, adopted Six Sigma in order to improve quality, increase competitiveness, and reduce costs.

Six Sigma is broadly defined as a “set of techniques and tools for process improvement.” It seeks to improve the quality of the output of a process by identifying and removing the causes of defects and minimizing variability in manufacturing and business processes. It uses a set of what are known as quality management methods (mainly empirical, statistical methods) and creates a special infrastructure of people within the organization, who are experts in these methods. Each Six Sigma project carried out within an organization follows a sequence of steps and has specific value targets, for example: reduce process cycle time, reduce pollution, reduce costs, increase customer satisfaction and increase profits.

Don’t sweat it if you struggle to understand what all of this really means. The “Black Belts” I’ve spoken with recite bits and pieces of the above, state idioms such as “enacting processes which help us work smarter,” or recount other vaguely technical concepts such as Lean, Continuous Improvement, Kanban, RCM, TQM, FMEA or Kaizen. No worries, you can easily absorb a Six Sigma narrative by simply nodding yes when your boss speaks.

Why Do Six Sigma Initiatives Fail?

The implementation of Six Sigma usually starts off well. Motivational speeches are given by the senior leadership to generate excitement and an expectation of improvement. Progress is perceived as managers attempt to define “customers.” Engineers develop statistical models and draw diagrams to demonstrate and analyze the things that can be measured. Eerily similar to fad-diet plans, however, Six Sigma initiatives seem to rarely enjoy meaningful, lasting impact. Management focus wanes with the scarcity of short-term, tangible improvements and the rank-and-file enthusiasm dwindles. Organizations revert to old ways. Indeed, many Six Sigma initiatives fail to yield their desired results.

To understand why, a joke may help. Question: How many Six Sigma Black Belts does it take to screw in a light bulb? Answer: One, but they’ll need 3-6 months and a cross functional team to do the actual work.

Although simplistic, this joke captures the sentiment of many familiar with Six Sigma. American industry was built upon innovation and entrepreneurial spirit. Six-Sigma practices, with their time-consuming processes, fly in the face of spontaneity and creativity. Employees in general hate additional processes and the easiest way to sabotage morale is to enact another “must do” task in the form of a Six Sigma mandate. Perhaps most absurd is that little evidence suggests that Six Sigma actually improves bottom line performance. To summarize, Six Sigma may not help but it will most likely hurt.

Six Sigma in the Power Plant

Historically, the instances where Six Sigma demonstrated limited success were among discrete manufacturers where distinct items were produced such as automobiles or consumer electronics. Quality could readily be measured. The assembly line could be shut down to investigate a bottleneck. Every hold point in the process could provide its own set of statistical measures.

As manufacturers lost their mojo, Black Belts sought greener pastures. Several convinced chemical, pharmaceutical or petroleum industries that Six Sigma would “revolutionize.” Some even sold themselves into power plant management roles. But there exist problems with this idea.

· Process industries are fundamentally different from discrete manufacturing in that materials flow in a continuous stream instead of separate and distinct batches. In power plants, fuel and water make steam which spins a turbine to generate electricity. That series of continuous processes does not stop.

· The quality and/or reliability of discrete manufacturing products can be recognized and measured. Both the steam produced and the electricity generated in power plants are commodities; their quality is consistent and cannot be quantified.

· Customer satisfaction can easily be measured among discrete manufacturers in the forms of product returns or customer complaints. Regarding power generation, the focus tends to be on technical issues rather than on customer satisfaction; end customers are disconnected from and anonymous to the electrical grid.

· Power industry engineers solve technical problems whereas Black Belts minimize defects.

· Six Sigma requires data collection and evidence to improve things that may not be worth improving or that can be improved more simply by other means.

· Power plant processes are often developed organically through iterations of personnel and maintained via “tribal knowledge.” An accurate portrait of a particular process, if one exists, is found among a “group conscience” of many and is difficult to capture.

· Six Sigma suppresses creativity because it stresses more on process analysis tools than on identifying root causes and solutions.

Trying to apply Six Sigma to power plants, or other process industries, is akin to putting square pegs into round holes. Few, if any, examples exist which demonstrate meaningful, sustained success. Many have attempted Six Sigma, few have succeeded, and most have failed.