Consultant or Lean Six Sigma training? Why it's a false choice
I recently saw a post on LinkedIn boasting: "I just saved my client £1.2m a year."
It described a client deciding between two options to solve a problem. Option A was bringing in a consultant. Option B was training a group of employees in Lean Six Sigma.
Using some fairly confident assumptions about cost, rework, sustainability and how often a consultant would need to return, the conclusion was clear: training your people would deliver a net benefit of £1.2m a year. The consultant was framed as expensive and ineffective.
To be fair, there is a genuine challenge with sustainability when you bring someone in to solve a problem for you. When they leave, there's always a risk the organisation drifts back to old ways of working, even if the solution was a good one. And as I've written before, any solution imposed from outside manufactures resistance to change.
I get what the post was trying to do. But if you didn't know better, it would lead you to believe that:
- those are the only two options
- the business doesn't already have the skills to fix the problem
- the consultant is expensive and their solution won't stick
- the problem actually gets solved as a result of the training
None of these are necessarily true. And there's a big difference between leaving options unexplored and stating there are only two. The second closes the mind to anything else.
So here's my "yeah, but..."
Lean Six Sigma training is skills training
Before anyone points it out: yes, Lean as a philosophy speaks to culture. But the training you buy is about tools and techniques. It's about skills.
That can be really valuable. But be honest with yourself. In your organisation, do problems genuinely exist because people don't know how to fix them? Or is something else going on?
If you choose the training route, you'll likely take a dozen capable, motivated people off the floor for a week. They'll learn new tools. They'll get excited. They'll see opportunities everywhere.
And then you'll send them back into the same organisation. The same leadership behaviours. The same approval structures. The same priorities. The same consequences for getting things wrong.
If nothing else changes, what do you really expect to happen?
Here's the reality for most organisations. Your people are already experts in the work they do. In most cases they're perfectly capable of spotting what needs to improve. They know where the waste is, where the friction is, and where the handoffs break down.
So if they're not fixing it, the question isn't always "Do they have the skills?" It might be "Do they feel able?" or even "Are they allowed?" Their perception is their reality. If they believe they're not allowed, then they're not.
Option C: the barrier is in the system
This is what the consultant versus training debate misses completely.
Maybe you haven't given your people the authority to improve their processes. Maybe you haven't set clear expectations. Maybe they've learned that sticking to the script is safer than experimenting. Maybe, when someone tries something and it doesn't work perfectly, your response is scrutiny rather than support.
Think about your own reactions. When someone delivers a successful improvement, you probably praise them. Who wouldn't? But when someone tries something and it doesn't land first time, what do you do?
You get the behaviour you reward. If you only reward perfect outcomes, you teach people to avoid the risk of getting it wrong.
How? By not trying in the first place, of course. Trying something new always carries a risk of getting it wrong, so why bother?
That conditioning doesn't start at work, by the way. It starts in school. Right answers get ticks and praise. Wrong answers get red pen. Over time, most of us learn that being wrong carries a cost we'd rather avoid.
What "enabling improvement" really means
So when you talk about enabling improvement, be clear what that means in your organisation.
- Are people genuinely expected to challenge the way things are done?
- Do they have permission to act?
- Will you back them when experiments don't work first time?
If the real constraint is cultural or in the system, neither a consultant nor a training course will fix it. You can bring in the best external expertise in the world, and the system will absorb it. You can invest in skills training, and the tools will sit unused if people don't feel safe or expected to use them.
Before you choose, zoom out
What problem are you actually trying to solve? Is it genuinely a capability gap? If it is, invest in skills.
But if the problem is that improvement feels risky, unnecessary, or out of step with what you actually reward, no amount of training will change anything.
At that point, the real work isn't choosing between a consultant and Lean Six Sigma. It's looking honestly at the conditions you've created, and asking why the people best placed to solve the problem haven't.