Which Pill to Take: Lean Six Sigma or Design Sprint (Design Thinking v2.0)

Dec 28

Originally Published 12.28.2017

"You take the blue pill, and the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes." ―Morpheus to Neo (The Matrix movie)

In the 1999 film The Matrix, the main character Neo is offered the choice between a red pill and a blue pill by rebel leader Morpheus. The red pill would free him from the enslaving control of the machine-generated dream world. On the other hand, the blue pill would lead him back to stay in the comfortable simulated reality of the Matrix.

For both Lean Six Sigma and Design Thinking Professionals, however, the decision to choose either Lean Six Sigma or Design Sprint (Design Thinking v2.0) is usually not the first question to answer. Most of the time, we suffer from "exaggerated confidence based on one's expert experience". Simply put, "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail (Maslow, 1962)". This means, for a Lean Six Sigma professional, most problems look like DMAIC can solve, and for Designers, the 5-day Design Sprint is the way to go.

For those who are knowledgeable of both best practices, the choice of what to use is usually difficult because there is currently no framework for identifying what methodology to pick. Both Lean Six Sigma and Design Thinking professionals say that some problems may be solved by either of the two or a combination of both. This leads to trial-and-error which means more time and more resources spent on projects.

Rare Misprints of 100-peso Faceless Bills

On December 28, 2017, In a televised press conference, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) Managing Director Carlyn Pangilinan said Machine errors have caused “rare misprints” of the 100-peso “faceless bills”.

Now, before you react to how inefficient and incompetent BSP is, it was found that there are only 33 misprinted bills out of the millions of pieces BSP prints in a day, or at least 728 million pieces they print in a year. In Lean Six Sigma lingo, it is equivalent to only 0.04 defects per million opportunities, exceeding even the ultimate goal of Lean Six Sigma which is 3.4 defects per million opportunities.

This problem though is a good example of how to clearly distinguish a Design Problem from a problem that can be solved by Lean Six Sigma's DMAIC methodology.

Let's look at how the two problems are difficult:

Design Problem

According to an Inquirer news article, consumers have expressed confusion at being handed the recently released five-peso silver coins which are closely similar in shape and in size to the one-peso BSP coins.

This is a perfect "design" problem that can be solved by Design Sprint. Persons involved in designing and launching this new generation coin have not considered critical user experience, lacked user "empathy", and "assumed" that what they think the users need are, is exactly what they really need. The BSP officials should have collected customer insights into the prototype and adjusted the specifications based on the user feedback before minting the new coins.
Design Sprint (Design Thinking v2.0) focuses on 3 things:
1. Develop a New Product or Service that your target customers love.
2. Innovating an Existing Product or Service to make it better for your target customers.
3. Improving the Customer Experience of your existing product or service.

Lean Six Sigma Problems
This can be solved by using Lean Six Sigma's DMAIC methodology

Process Defects
(Face and some areas not printed)

Process Delays
*NOT a real-life example
(If let's say BSP's target is to print 1 Million pcs of bills per day, and at the end of the day only 950,000 pcs were printed)

Variations
*NOT a real-life example
(Variation of sizes of bills: Some did not meet the standard length, width, or both)

Lean Six Sigma focuses on 3 things:
Reduction of:
1. Process Defects
2. Process Delays
3. Process Variations
of existing products or services of a company. The assumption of Lean Six Sigma: a company has a product or service that the customers love. Lean Six Sigma is not after designing a new product or service, but after the company delivers the product or service, with fewer defects, delays, and variations.

Conclusion
Lean Six Sigma is used if your existing product/ service has recurring problems with process defects, delays, and variations. It means you still do not know what solutions to do for your problem because you still do not know what the root causes are.

For Design Sprint (Design Thinking v2.0), the problem is about how to facilitate innovation: How to design a new product or service that your target customers love; How to innovate an existing product or service; and how to improve the customer experience of your existing product or service.

What business problems do you currently have? Will you take the Lean Six Sigma pill? or choose the Design Sprint (Design Thinking v2.0) pill?

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