The first paper in this series discussed the reasons that so many people believe in blatant nonsense, such as Six Sigma.[1] The second paper, Six Sigma Stupidity, discussed the laughable attempts by Six Sigma's self-confessed con man founder, Mikel Harry, to rationalize the irrational.[2] This paper looks at how it all started with some silly errors, seemingly made quite innocently, by the university drop out, Mr Bill Smith. Mr Smith is claimed to be the "father" of Six Sigma.[3] Was he really responsible for the mother of all monstrosities? Ironically, Mr Smith was a strong supporter of TQM and Dr Deming (Professor in Statistics). Six Sigma became the antithesis of everything Dr Deming taught.[4][5]
Harry in a paternity dispute, also claimed to be the "father" of Six Sigma.[6] He tried so hard to prop up the "six sigma" of his "Six Sigma", but where did he get the ridiculous +/-1.5 sigma that forms Six Sigma, in the first place? Harry points out that the "chief" among his workmates was Mr Bill Smith. I suppose it was hardly surprising that a Mary Lou Teachers College graduate such as Harry should be impressed by a man claiming to be an engineer such as Mr Smith and what he claims his "brilliant contributions" [7]. Harry says: "I am not an engineer. I have to admit I did not know what Bill was talking about" [8]. We will see just how "brilliant" Mr Smith was below. Our question becomes, where did Mr Smith get the "+/-1.5 sigma" that formed the basis of what Money Watch calls, the "Most Stupid Management Fad of All Time"[21].
Mr Smith wasn't exactly prolific in his writing but he did have a single article to which we can refer, in order to determine where Six Sigma was rooted.[9] Mr Smith's paper makes a bad start by showing that he does not understand the meaning of a Shewhart Chart. Mr Smith falls into the old bear trap of thinking it's a probability chart. Dr Shewhart, (Founding member, Fellow and President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics; Fellow and President of the American Statistical Association), showed the real brilliance in that his charts do not depend on probability distributions. Most Six Sigma practitioners are totally ignorant of this quality fundamental and have been conned into buying statistical software to massage data before it is charted. Dr Shewhart's assertion was later proved by Dr Wheeler, (PhD in Statistics), in his book "Normality and the Process Behavior Chart", wherein he tested Dr Shewhart's assertion against 1143 different distributions. [10]
Mr Smith goes on to talk about casting parts in his workplace. He noted how parts shrink after casting and cooling. Mr Smith says shrinkage can be "up to 15%" in his process. Metallurgists who may be reading this may think Mr Smith's "15%" is an order of magnitude too large, but hey, anything is possible in Six Sigma fairyland. Mr Smith points out that after cooling, his casting process needs to be manually adjusted to try to bring the cooled part into specification. That is, he manually changes his process after each measurement, to try to achieve a target value after cooling. A sort of control-after-the-event.
Dr Deming warned against such process "tweaking" because it increases variation. Mr Smith didn't seem to have been aware of Dr Deming's advice although he did show much respect for him. Mr Smith would have benefited from doing Dr Deming's "Monte Carlo experiments with the funnel" [11 - page 327]. He would have benefited far more than his psychologist friend who fiddled with Monte Carlo simulations in Excel, in his on-going attempts to justify his +/-1.5 and six sigma. [12]
Not surprisingly, there was a lot of variation in Mr Smith's components. Guess how much variation Mr Smith experienced in his casting process? Yes, you guessed it, "as much as +/- 1.5 sigma off target". Voila! This is the origin of Six Sigma's 'six sigma'! So much for Mr Smith's "brilliance".
Mr Smith had a process that was out of control. It had special causes that caused the mean to shift dramatically and unpredictably. The farce of Six Sigma began when it was claimed that all processes in all industries, at all times, behave as Mr Smith's did and that all processes experience the same lack of control that his did. Is that "brilliant" or what? The most incredible thing is that companies around the world, believed it! They believed they were doomed if they didn't give generously to Six Sigma consultants. No one bothered to check!
Mr Smith also refers to tolerancing in his article. Perhaps this is where his perplexed pal Harry jumped into Benderizing. Benderizing, one of Harry's first shots in the dark, was his claim that the tolerance in the height of a stack of discs was supposed to "prove" his six sigma.[13]
Mr Smith refers to a sidebar signed by the magazine editor, Linda Geppert (now deceased). "Another way to improve yield is to increase the design specification width. This influences the quality of product as much as control of process variation does." If quality could only be as easy as Mr Smith and Ms Geppert claimed. Don't bother with variation, just broaden the specification limits!
Linda's sidebar also creates the much reproduced picture of three overlapping normal distributions. Linda claims it shows what happens when the mean shifts by +/-1.5 sigma. She claims that a variation "of as much as +/-1.5 sigma is not surprising". I wonder how surprised Linda would be to learn that there is no limit to how far the mean can shift. Dr Wheeler's example shows a controlled process with shifts of as much as +/- 8 sigma.[14] This would no doubt also surprise Harry, who jumped on Linda's claim and turned it into what I termed his "maximum move madness" proof for six sigma [2].
So if Six Sigma is utter nonsense, what are we to do? Follow Mr Smith's advice of course! Mr Smith recommends: "The answer has become Total Quality Management". After all, Motorola won the Baldrige Award using TQM before they slipped into Six Sigma Stupidity and the company started its downward spiral. Mr Smith advises following Dr Deming's principles: "His now famous '14 points of management' when followed, appear to move organizations towards prosperity" . Such a pity his employer didn't follow his advice.
The reference to Six Sigma Stupidity, or "goofiness" as Dr Wheeler calls it [15] , is of course not directed at employees sent to Six Sigma courses. Employees are certainly not so stupid as to speak out and risk their jobs. Six Sigma Stupidity is not directed at managers who feel that having a certificate from someone else with a certificate, will increase their salary more than working for a degree. Managers are not stupid. Managers have families to feed.
Six Sigma Stupidity is directed at the methodology, its creator and those who still promote the nonsense. It is hardly surprising that Six Sigma Stupidity snake oil salesmen continue to hurl abuse at those with integrity. In hundreds of forum replies, not a single person has attempted to present any shred of evidence to support to Six Sigma's ridiculous foundations. The reason is obvious. Six Sigma is a scam.
The responsibility for buy-in to Six Sigma Stupidity rests on the shoulders of CEOs. CEOs are not stupid either but are easily fooled by fast talking Six Sigma salesmen with hollow hype and outlandish promises. It is CEOs who are responsible for the "58 large companies announced Six Sigma programs, 91 percent have trailed the S&P 500 since" [16]. No wonder Six Sigma has failed when based on such stupidity.
IBM was one of the first companies to jump into the Six Sigma stew. However its statisticians who analyzed Six Sigma were not stupid either. "We expressed concern with Motorola s misuse of statistical terms, the thin theoretical and practical evidence for the 1.5 sigma shift, and the dubious means of counting defects and opportunities for defects." Like other employees, keeping their jobs was more important: "Our position paper was finally regarded as too disruptive". Thanks to its management, IBM became another victim.
Six Sigma salesmen have managed to prolong the stupidity by tacking on "Lean" and calling it Lean Six Sigma. There is nothing wrong with Lean and there is nothing wrong with that part of Six Sigma its psychologist progenitor called "80% TQM". It is the name Six Sigma, its foundations and its off shoots, that are the farce. Normalization, incorrect charting methods, dpmo, defects targets, alienation of employees with belts hierarchies are wrong and/or destructive. While there is nothing inherently wrong with some of the material such as hypothesis testing, it is totally irrelevant to process improvement. Dr Deming pointed out: "Analysis of variance, t- test, confidence intervals, and other statistical techniques taught in the books, however interesting, are inappropriate". [11] Six Sigma courses are simply padded with such material to justify Six Sigma salesmen's ridiculously high prices. While hypothesis testing was quite appropriate in Harry's Psychology 101 class, it has no place in process improvement.
Harry's comments to the Six Sigma Stupidity paper [2] are worth reading for a good chuckle: "the shift factor is not a statement of how much processes shift" . Wow, why didn't I see that? Clearly, the shift is not a shift, and six sigma is not six sigma. I've also had a good belly laugh at several Six Sigma consultants on forums, who have sagely dropped similar gems "it's a drift, not a shift". Father Harry didn't help with his "Shifts and Drifts" [17/2] Perhaps I should be compassionate. Stupidity can be confusing.
Harry was totally ignorant about the nature of quality. He claimed that TQM, as recommended by his buddy Bill Smith, "... is a defects-focussed quality improvement initiative."[18] Unless you have been living on another planet, you will know that TQM is based on "on target with minimum variance", as described by Dr Deming, Dr Wheeler and Dr Taguchi. It is Harry's own Six Sigma that is the defects based methodology. It was precisely this reason that Dr Wheeler and Professor Deming stated "Six Sigma, and all other [specification-based] nostrums all miss the point. The sooner one wakes up, the sooner one can begin to compete."[19]
Harry continues in his comments to the Six Sigma Stupidity paper[2], with links to his 2013 article that make the incredible claim "1.5 sigma shift factor have [sic] little to do with SPC". It seems Harry missed the point that process improvement is the basis of quality! Harry states: "... opponents of the shift factor are absolutely correct - the shift factor has no place in the world of statistical process control or statistical process monitoring." Yikes! The "co-creator" of Six Sigma admits six sigma has no place in monitoring processes! All those drifting, shifting means, all those Six Sigma defect tables can be thrown away on the advice of Six Sigma's daddy! This is one of the great difficulties in selling nonsense like Six Sigma - it is so easy to trip over your own toes.
In summary, we see that Six Sigma Stupidity started with an engineer and a magazine editor's simple errors, that a psychologist turned into a farce.
There is a desperate need for companies to recover from the insanity of Six Sigma, to move organizations back to prosperity. There is a huge task ahead in re-education. While the foundations of Six Sigma are so utterly ridiculous, there have been so many equally destructive off shoots. Only today a medical professional said to me "Software has made this chart almost obsolete". No, I replied. The correct statement is: "People profiting by selling software based on Six Sigma have made this chart almost obsolete. Dr Wheeler has shown the simple Shewhart chart I recommended is more appropriate".
It is time to throw out Six Sigma Stupidity and everything related to it. It is time to get back to basics and the fundamentals of quality. "Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement for everyone" (point 13 of Dr Deming's 14 points). All employees have a role to play in quality, not just the privileged. Our approach is to use spectacular cutting edge technology to engage and inspire all employees back to the path of quality [20]. This can be done at a dramatically lower cost than the ridiculous prices of Six Sigma Stupidity courses. We have priced our product, Q-Skills3D, at a small fraction of the boring "page turning" e-learning of the past, in order to help make quality easily accessible to all employees. As developers, we could have chosen to follow the herd and milk the gullible using Six Sigma. Instead, we have acted with integrity and excluded all Six Sigma nonsense.
If companies so choose, there are many good consultants to assist in classroom training in quality, implementation and support, who do not put "SS" after their name, who are intelligent, who are not abusive, and who do not sacrifice integrity for the latest fad.
Quality is for everyone.
Dr Tony Burns BE (Hon1), PhD (Chem Eng)
References
1. Six Sigma Psychology - Dr Burns, M McLean http://www.qualitydigest.com/inside/quality-insider-column/six-sigma-psychology.html
2. Six Sigma Psychology - Part 2 - "Six Sigma Stupidity" - Dr Burns, M McLean https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/six-sigma-psychology-part-2-tony-burns/
3. Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Smith_(Motorola_engineer)
4. Six Sigma Lessons from Deming, Part 1 - Dr Burns http://www.qualitydigest.com/inside/six-sigma-article/six-sigma-lessons-deming-part-1#
5. Six Sigma Lessons from Deming, Part 2 - Dr Burns http://www.qualitydigest.com/inside/six-sigma-article/six-sigma-lessons-deming-part-2#
6. Dr Mikel Harry web site http://www.mikeljharry.com/milestones.php
7. The Technical History of Six Sigma https://drmikelharry.wordpress.com/2013/10/22/the-technical-history-of-six-sigma/
8. Dr Mikel Harry web site http://www.mikeljharry.com/media/1984_01.pdf
9. Making War on Defects - Mr bill Smith, Ms Linda Geppert IEEE Spectrum Set 1993 page 43
10. Normality and the Process Behaviour Chart - Dr Wheeler SPC Press 2000.
11. Out of the Crisis. - Dr Deming. 1986 page 327
12. "Resolving the Mysteries of Six Sigma" - Mikel Harry.
13. Sick Sigma - Dr Burns https://www.qualitydigest.com/inside/six-sigma-article/sick-sigma.html
14. Consistency Charts - Dr Wheeler https://www.qualitydigest.com/inside/quality-insider-article/consistency-charts.html
15. The Six Sigma Zone - Dr Wheeler http://www.spcpress.com/pdf/DJW177.pdf
16 Survey by Charles Holland of consulting firm Qualpro http://www.qualproinc.com
17. The Shifty Business of Process Shifts: Part 1 - Dr Mikel Harry https://drmikelharry.wordpress.com/2013/08/12/the-shifty-business-of-process-shifts-part-1/ https://drmikelharry.wordpress.com/2013/08/26/the-shifty-business-of-process-shifts-part-2/ https://drmikelharry.wordpress.com/2013/10/29/the-shifty-business-of-process-shifts-part-3/
18. http://www.mikeljharry.com/media/2002_01.pdf
19. "Advanced Topics in SPC" - Dr Wheeler
20. New Technology Training in Quality - Dr Burns https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-technology-training-quality-tony-burns/
21. Money Watch https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-8-stupidest-management-fads-of-all-time/2/
* Six Sigma is a Motorola US Service and Trade Mark, although Mikel Harry claims he co-created it..
by Dr Tony Burns BE (Hon 1) PhD (Chem Eng)