A great article from Dan Markovitz in IndustryWeek on the pitfalls of running a belt blitz instead of creating a culture of continuous improvement. Read the article here:

Source: https://www.industryweek.com/operations/article/22028253/your-lean-six-sigma-belt-program-is-the-problem

Snippet:

A company focusing on green belt projects instead of daily kaizen is like a dieter focusing on calorie counting instead of building a healthy lifestyle—not just fewer calories, but a better variety of food, less alcohol, more exercise, and more sleep. You might lose a few pounds by counting calories, but it’s unlikely to be sustainable over the long term.

Another problem with most belt programs—particularly ones tied to performance reviews—is that the extrinsic motivation of a good review (and presumably a salary increase) displaces the intrinsic motivation of learning new skills and improving the organization’s performance. This is why companies only give small dollar awards, and not large cash gifts, for improvements.

Finally, there’s a lot of effort devoted to teaching advanced statistical analysis (ANOVA, multi-factorial regressions, t-tests, etc.) and other highly advanced tools (DFSS, DOE, etc.). These tools definitely have their place, and you probably want your company to have some people who know how to use them. But you’d get a better return on the investment of people’s attention if they just learned the 7 Basic Quality Tools (cause and effect diagram; check sheet; control chart; histogram; pareto chart; scatter diagram; run chart) . . .and then spent more time actually fixing stuff.