This post will distinguish the key differences between Six Sigma/Kaiizen and performance consulting approaches and will explain why both are needed.
Both Six Sigma and Kaiizen were born in the manufacturing environment. Kaiizen is more focused on improvements overall and Six Sigma is focused on the elimination of quality defects with a reliance on statistical analysis. In a purist sense, both Six Sigma and Kaiizen methodologies operate in different ways within the same basic framework:
- Describe the current process
- Detect and measure waste or increase efficiencies (Six Sigma uses statistical method)
- Identify improvement(s) to eliminate that waste
- Implement improvement(s)
- Measure the impact of improvement(s).
But in this context, it is extremely important to ask yourself a few questions like: "What are problems? What is waste? And what is inefficiency? Your answer will determine the effectiveness of your performance improvement approach.
Since both Six Sigma and Kaiizen were born in the context of manufacturing or 'making/producing things,' both tend to see problems as production waste and/or production inefficiencies. In a production context, waste is any unneeded step(s) in a production process and inefficiencies are any unnecessary cost in production processes. Said another way, what step(s) are not needed to make the things you want to make and what money does not need to be spent in the process of making things you want to make?
Enter performance consulting. While performance consulting is typically associated with training, it is really the science of solving any performance problems—and training is only one of many interventions that solve performance problems. In my personal approach to performance consulting, I delineate five categories of performance: 1) thinking, 2) knowing, 3) saying, 4) doing, and 5) enabling. 2 and 3 can be combined, but I use these five as a framework for analyzing what problem you need to solve and also as a framework for performance measurement.
At any rate, in the performance consulting frame, problems are seen in a much broader context than in the Six Sigma/Kaiizen frame. From a performance consulting perspective, problems are anything that prevents objectives from being accomplished, waste is anything that does not contribute to the accomplishment of those objectives, and inefficiency is anything that adds unnecessary cost to accomplishing set objectives.
Because it is centered on accomplishing objectives, performance consulting is a compliment to the performance management process. Companies set strategy, derive objectives from that strategy, and they set out to accomplish those objectives with execution governed by performance management. Performance consulting then, works in this context, seeking to understand why objectives are not being met, or it works to ‘raise the bar’ of performance expectations.
In performance consulting, a performance needs assessment, a performance analysis, or a gap analysis is used to determine what problem needs to be solved. There are many different models for this which I won’t get into in this post, but suffice it to say that performance consulting looks quite extensively and comprehensively at all aspects of performance, not just production or process aspects.
As such, the definition of a ‘problem’ in the performance consulting frame is much broader than it is in the Six Sigma or Kaiizen frame. An organization can use Six Sigma/Kaiizen to remove all wasted and costly steps in a process and still have performance problems that need to be solved. For example, the employees may not be motivated to perform that 100% waste-free, efficient process. Or the employees themselves may have knowledge or skill gaps that prevent them from performing it. Performance consulting looks comprehensively at the performance problem, well beyond the Six Sigma/Kaiizen production mindset.
It is because of this Achilles heel in problem identification, that Six Sigma and Kaiizen, when applied to overall performance within an organization, starts to become ineffective (or even cannibalistic) after about 5 years of implementation. The obvious problems are identified and solved early in the implementation, and the deeper or more abstract problems that remain are best identified through a more sophisticated approach like performance consulting. It is possible to avoid this affect with customization, but most companies squarely hit this wall.
But while both Six Sigma and Kaiizen are weak in terms of problem identification, they are both very strong in terms of actually solving certain problems. Performance consulting has a broader set of interventions than Six Sigma/Kaiizen have, but both Six Sigma and Kaiizen are much stronger than performance consulting when applied to production problems.
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