Organizational Culture and Change
An organization’s value system and guiding principles that influence behavior.
Culture
These are practices recognized by the business community, and often verified by research, that lead to successful performance, and cannot be simply benchmarked and copied.
Best Practice
This consists of six stages: Adoption, Regeneration, Energizing, Maturation, Limitation / Stagnation, and Decline.
Life Cycle of Quality Initiatives
In one organization’s Six Sigma deployment, employees completed large amounts of training, but projects lacked executive involvement, weren’t tied to data or strategy, and eventually lost momentum. This represents the classic example of what deployment problem?
Failure Mode
Checkpoint where teams must show data-based progress before advancing
Tollgate Review
This refers to the shared values and beliefs that shape how employees act and make decisions.
Corporate Culture
Senior leaders must be actively engaged (participating in training, reviewing progress, making site visits).
Committed Leadership from Top Management
Early Enthusiasm refers to when momentum is high at the start, Reality Dip refers to when doubt starts to rollout, Random Acts of Improvement refers to uncoordinated fixes, and Project-Based Plateau is a stall when improvements are scattered.
Common Dynamics & Warnings
Another company demonstrated the opposite outcome. Their CEO personally championed the improvement program, set clear expectations at tollgate reviews, required finance to validate results, and celebrated visible business wins. This became known as which type of deployment model?
Success Pattern
Fixing causes in the whole system instead of patching symptoms.
Systems Thinking
A workplace where every employee embraces quality values, goals, and continuous improvement as a lifestyle.
Culture of Quality
The initiative must be justified and clearly linked to the organization's mission, strategic direction, and existing performance measurement systems.
Integration with Strategy and Measurement
This refers to senior leaders actively sponsoring, reviewing, and modeling quality behaviors.
Leadership Commitment
When a company rushed its Six Sigma rollout with weak leadership, poor training, and no link to strategy or data, the program collapsed and was seen as a cultural mismatch.
A Tale of Two Companies
Practice where quality is integrated into every process, not just one department
Cross-Functional Quality
This refers to when shared behaviors and values are at odds with an organization’s long-term health.
Dysfunctional Corporate Culture
Focus on business processes, including mapping them and using a disciplined approach to information gathering, analysis, and problem-solving.
Process Thinking
Routines leaders use (reviews, huddles, check-ins) to run and improve the work.
Management Processes
When two neighbors competed for the best lawn, one took shortcuts while the other prepared patiently—proving that lasting results come from discipline and fixing root causes, not quick fixes.
The Parable of the Green Lawn
Believing outside factors caused failure instead of one’s own poor process.
Fairness Fallacy
The structured process of helping organizations transition from current to desired states.
Change Management
This is vital to ensure improvements target characteristics most important to customers
Disciplined Customer and Market Intelligence Gathering
This refers to turning core values into actions, measures, and daily decisions.
Values Deployment
When a traveler entered a strange new world, built a team, overcame obstacles, and learned that real power for change was within her all along, it became a symbol of transformation and empowerment.
The Yellow Brick Road to Quality
Short, time-bound improvement cycles designed to produce visible quick wins.
0-Day Action Planning