Improvement Insights Blog
Would You Rather Have 100 Yellow Belts or 2-3 GBs or BBs?
Most companies start their Six Sigma implementation by training a few Green and Black Belts. That works some of the time, but it’s the wrong way to go. Start with Yellow Belts. Here’s why:
“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma For Hospitals” and QI Macros [software].
“You know, a lot of companies start up their [Quality Improvement program] and they go out and they train a Black Belt and a few Green Belts and try to get things going. Then like many companies, they discover that they’re not getting the results that they want. What might make more sense is the Agile approach I suggest in my book (which you can download from our website) where you train Yellow Belts in a day and get results.
“As you do that, you can… discover the people in those rooms, in those sinks, that really have the aptitude, the desire, the mental whatever-it-is to be problem solvers and use data to do it. Those people should go on into Green Belt and Black Belt training.
“I hear far too much from Consultants who say “People are ‘one and done,’ they get trained, they do one project and they stop doing it.” I hate to tell you this: that’s a total waste of money and time. That’s just bad, right? So why don’t we just train a hundred Yellow Belts, and out of that get a handful of Green Belts and Black Belts who really have the skills, the ability and the mental aptitude to go get that done.
“So that’s my Improvement Insight: Let’s go out and improve how we implement Six Sigma, how we pick who we train, so that we can get better and better results all the time, and so it’s not just one and done. It’s “I’ve been trained and I’m still changing things all the time.” I’ve seen a few Black Belts and Master Black Belts who are just still out there cutting a wide swath through all the defects, mistakes, errors, waste, rework, lost profit and patient harm. You want more of those people.
“Let’s go out and improve something this week.”
