Overcoming Resistance to Lean Six Sigma | Counter Gravity
I’ve been looking back at my recent posts and realised something. I’m sounding a bit preachy.
“Clients don’t do this right,” “You should do it this way,” “Look how great these tools are.”
It’s easy to paint a rosy picture when you’re a consultant. But the truth? I’ve run businesses and I’ve struggled. I’ve tried to roll out Lean Six Sigma in low-margin industries with massive customer pressures and daily fires to fight, and I’ve not achieved my aims, in the early days usually because I was poor at the “soft stuff”.
In my first two roles out of Uni, I was as green as the grass.
Role 1: The Sawmill Lesson. I was a Project Engineer in the timber industry. I was implementing 3D laser scanning and using LSS for statistical analysis and project management. It was beautiful. I’d sit late into the night optimising simulations and software utilisation. In my head, it was perfect.
Every morning, I’d march up to the Head Sawmill Operator with a fresh list of data I needed him to capture. I thought everyone would be as excited about the data as I was.
Then came the “boom”. A short, sharp, and very blunt put-down from the operator that left me realising just how off track I was.
I had missed the fact that he had a gruelling day job to do.
I learned then that the Optimum Solution = Quality of Solution x Acceptance.
If the people using it don’t accept it, your perfect solution equals zero.
I pivoted. I stopped being just the data guy and started helping him with his actual job. We made the system simpler together, with saved programs he could select based on the type of material being processed. I mistake proofed it for him, not for my spreadsheet.
Role 2: The Food Industry Reality Check. Later, as a CI Manager in food manufacturing, I had another perfect plan. Total OEE across the business, everyone logging downtime, weekly Yellow Belt training for everyone from the shop floor to engineering.
It looked great on my project tracker. Until I sat down with the Engineering and Manufacturing Managers.
They showed me the cost. The overtime for engineers and operators to attend my sessions and log my data was eating the very margins we were trying to save. In a low-margin business, my savings were actually a net loss.
The Pivot: We sat down and redesigned the approach together. It was slower. It was more focused. We created a strategy for the right projects, not all the projects. It delivered. Maybe not as fast as I wanted, but it actually stuck.
The takeaway? Lean Six Sigma isn’t a hammer to beat people with. It’s a way to make their lives easier while protecting the bottom line.
If you’re struggling to get buy-in, stop looking at the data and start looking at the day job. Acceptance is the only variable that truly scales.
Oh, was starting to sound preachy again at the end there. Old habits die hard!
