Improvement Insights Blog

Minimum Viable Training (MVT) is a quick way to implement Six Sigma. Here’s why:

“Well hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software]. I’m here at the beautiful Maui Kaanapali Villas on Kaanapali beach in Maui, and my friend and I are just kind of hanging out here.

“I had this fascinating thing happen: one of our users, Jiri, went out and got onto our website and did a mind map of all of the training that’s out there and I was kind of blown away by how much stuff is out there. We created a lot of things over the last 20 years to help people learn Lean and Six Sigma quickly, easily and effortlessly.

He posted it on LinkedIn and then there was a comment that came in from someone on there. They said, “Well it’s missing the most important thing: Black Belt training… Black Belts.” I thought, “No, there’s a reason for that; it’s by design.”

“I believe that we should use MVT – Minimum Viable Training. We shouldn’t teach people things they don’t need to know, to solve problems they don’t have, to impress people they don’t like. Most of America works in service industries, not in manufacturing, which is where Six Sigma grew up. Motorola… you notice there’s not a lot of Motorola phones out there anymore, so even Six Sigma can’t save certain things.

“I believe that you can train people in a day and start getting results. Would you rather have a handful of Green Belts and Black Belts, or would you rather have an army of Yellow Belts?

“I also talked to a lot of trainers and consultants, and they kind of are bummed because they train people and people go out and do one project and then they quit. One project and then they quit. They call it “one and done” … they even have a phrase for it.

“All right, “one and done,” so what’s the problem here? Well, I think we’re picking people that are not cut out for the Quality Improvement business. One of the great things about Minimum Viable Training is you can train a lot of people, and out of that you’re going to discover that some people really have an aptitude for Quality Improvement and some don’t. So what we want to do is use that as a filtering mechanism to learn who has the skills and ability, and then and only then do we want to send them on to Green Belt and Black Belt training. You don’t want to start with Green Belt and Black Belts because those people may not get where you want them to go.

“So that’s my Improvement Insight for this week. Let’s go out and improve something – like the number of Yellow Belts we train – so that we can get the results we actually want.”