Much is said about how Six Sigma will radically change your company, how it will save millions of pounds / dollars, and how it will change your company’s culture. Little is said about on of the major problems most Six Sigma deployments even the mature ones face; the “non believers.”

They are a splinter group with pockets in every area of your company, from the executive down to lower management.

Their tactics for undermining Six Sigma is often one of passive resistance; not turning up for workshops, not contributing in meetings and / or reneging on actions in your Implementation Plan.

They make no open statements of dissent, just the odd snide comment about Karate (referring to the belts) or how they’ve seen similar process improvement concepts come and go; or even crazier still, how they have no time to improve their processes as they are all soooo busy.

You may not even know they are undermining you; hell, they may not even know they are undermining you.

They send their ‘least capable’ staff (the staff that they can afford to loose for a few days) on the yellow belt / green belt training courses. They give you ‘boil the ocean’ projects or withhold data that would make them look bad.

The fact is, over the short to medium term they are going to erode your Six Sigma deployment, but long term they could destroy your deployment or even destroy the whole concept globally, which is a shame because IT WORKS.

I would be interested in what you say or have said to these people (the ‘non-believers’) and what you do in your company to ‘sell’ the Six Sigma methodology.