It's Not Just About Taking Action - It's About The Way You Think

Change your Thinking

The performance of your business – and the everyday actions of each person within it – aren’t guided only by directives and procedures. Improvement projects and initiatives aren’t just about methods and tools. And wholesale change cannot be driven only by a few leaders.

Fundamentally, all behaviors in your organization, at every level, are motivated by how people think. To enable true organizational breakthrough, you need more than specialized practitioners guiding and directing people. Your entire organization needs to think in six sigma terms.

Until now, there has been no structured approach to “thinking six sigma” and no affordable way to train an individual or entire organization in the principles of performance breakthrough.

Breakthrough Thinking for Success

Breakthrough Thinking for Success condenses the whole of Six Sigma and change into its most simple and powerful elements, and helps large numbers of people internalize and personalize the principles of change before participating in widespread application in the workplace.

The Breakthrough Thinking for Success course exposes the underlying tenets of six sigma in a way that enables insight and empowers organizational motivation.

Breakthrough Thinking for Success resets the mind at a fundamental level and, therefore, builds the capability for change. The result is a highly fertile environment in which to plant and grow breakthrough improvement initiatives.

"Man is a thinking being; what and how we think largely determines what we are and what we will become."
~ Sterling W. Sill (1903-1994), American religious leader from Great Literature and The Good Life

Case Study

A 250-person manufacturing organization began a performance improvement initiative to become more productive and competitive. The plant’s leadership team decided that, the entire workforce should be exposed to the principles of change management, before training selected personnel to lead improvement projects.

Embarking on an intensive improvement program always requires the participation and cooperation of the people who know about and control operational excellence. Traditionally, an organization will select certain key people to own and drive improvements, and will provide the majority of the others with mass communication about the improvement initiative.

While few are directly involved, many are aware of the organizational need to “change the way it does business.”

In this case, plant management asked the probing question: “Can we give everyone some fundamental operational working knowledge, in addition to the targeted training for our top performers?”

Good idea. Give every single employee the prescription for effective change. Teach the underlying principles of enacting change and improvement to every single person in the plant. With this knowledge, everyone could understand how to truly support the formal change initiative and the people responsible for its success.

The value of this approach became crystal clear when compared with the idea of a classic, simple programmatic awareness campaign. So the organization’s leadership team arranged a training session with all employees to dive into the DNA of change, in addition to the particulars of the actual change initiative getting underway.

Approach

• A scientifically proven model for breakthrough thinking.
• A vision of determinism that shows you can control your inputs to ensure your outcomes.
• Awareness that harmful variation is present in all things, but it can – and must – be controlled.
• The power of measurement as a tool for making operational changes that can be verified and sustained.
• The leverage tool that closes the gap between where you are now and where you want to be.

After the training session, all workers were not only aware of the change initiative, but understood the driving force behind it. They were able to see that doing the same things the same old way would only lead to the same old results. They also realized that positive change is not just highly possible – it’s highly probable when powering thoughts with six sigma principles and empowering actions with six sigma practices.

Think before doing

The traditional path of a change initiative has been to first lead, then do: first stimulate change, then execute according to a stepwise methodology. Only after years of experience do change agents internalize the guiding principles of six sigma, and apply those principles as second nature in everything they do.

What you really want is people thinking like change agents as quickly as possible, even before they step into their leadership or management roles. You want them internalizing change thinking before applying the methods and tools of improvement.

When someone says “work smarter, don’t work harder,” what does that really mean? It means there’s a better way to think than the way you think now, inasmuch as there’s a better to do what you do. Breakthrough Thinking for Success make it easy and inexpensive to instill six sigma thinking in every single employee of an organization.