{"id":7949,"date":"2026-04-28T01:00:03","date_gmt":"2026-04-28T07:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/?p=7949"},"modified":"2026-02-18T15:57:44","modified_gmt":"2026-02-18T22:57:44","slug":"five-limitations-of-six-sigma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/five-limitations-of-six-sigma\/","title":{"rendered":"Five Limitations of Six Sigma"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>Six Sigma can go wrong. An article I read suggested at least five limitations of Six Sigma.<\/p>\r\n<p><em>Download my free ebook, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/pdf\/Agile-Process-Innovation.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Agile Process Innovation &#8211; Hacking Lean Six Sigma for Results<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/1121949690?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0\" width=\"720\" height=\"405\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><span data-mce-type=\"bookmark\" style=\"display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;\" class=\"mce_SELRES_start\">\ufeff<\/span><\/iframe><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p>&#8220;Hi, I&#8217;m Jay Arthur, author of \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Lean-Six-Sigma-Demystified-Second\/dp\/0071749098\/\">Lean Six Sigma Demystified<\/a>\u201d and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/demo\/\">QI Macros [software]<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;I was reading an article that was published talking about the limitations of Six Sigma. It had a bunch, but here&#8217;s five that I thought stood out for me.<\/p>\r\n<ol>\r\n<li><strong>High failure rate.<\/strong> That&#8217;s right. A lot of these implementations don&#8217;t work, and it puts a bad color on Six Sigma.<\/li>\r\n<li><strong>The high cost of implementation.<\/strong> Yeah, it costs a lot of money if you&#8217;re going to train everybody and do all this stuff at a high, traditional, last-century way of doing it.<\/li>\r\n<li><strong>The benefits are low in relationship to the investment.<\/strong> So, we&#8217;re not getting the payout. And if you don&#8217;t get the payout, guess what? They will shut down your Quality department. That&#8217;s just how that works.<\/li>\r\n<li><strong>It can have a negative impact on customers and employees if not implemented correctly.<\/strong> Right? It can harm your customers and your employees, kill employee morale, limit customer satisfaction.<\/li>\r\n<li><strong>Structured problem solving can stifle creativity and innovation.<\/strong> You know, Motorola is where Six Sigma was developed, and they did it because the CEO wanted to produce flawless cell phones. But you don&#8217;t see Motorola in the cell phone business anymore, right? You see Apple and Google. This is one of the challenges. You can get so busy making things flawless that you miss the whole change that&#8217;s going on in the world.<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<p>&#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/pdf\/Agile-Process-Innovation.pdf\">Agile Process Innovation<\/a> can solve that because it helps you accelerate and learn more quickly. And the QI Macros can make it faster, better, cheaper, safer. What&#8217;ll happen is as you simplify, streamline, and optimize things, you get to a point where you [think], &#8216;Hey, we could do this a better, totally innovative way,&#8217; or you discover a better product or you discover a better way to deliver a service or achieve some outcome.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;There are limitations to Six Sigma. It&#8217;s not a magical thing [where] you wave a wand and stuff just works. That&#8217;s not it.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;So that&#8217;s my Improvement Insight. Download a free copy of my Agile book at qimacros.com\/api and see how it works. Go out and start to create results, because that&#8217;s the only thing that matters to your senior leadership team.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s my Improvement Insight. Let&#8217;s go out and improve something this week.&#8221;<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Six Sigma can go wrong. An article I read suggested at least five limitations of Six Sigma. Download my free ebook, Agile Process Innovation &ndash; Hacking Lean Six Sigma for Results. &#65279; &ldquo;Hi, I&rsquo;m Jay Arthur, author of &ldquo;Lean Six Sigma Demystified&rdquo; and QI Macros [software]. &ldquo;I was reading an article that was published talking [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":8204,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[290],"tags":[434,654,168,170],"class_list":["post-7949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-improvement-insights","tag-agile-process-innovation","tag-limitations","tag-qi-macros","tag-six-sigma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7949"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7949\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8293,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7949\/revisions\/8293"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}