Blog: Lean Six Sigma Insights for Practitioners

July 25, 2026 · 6 min read

Lean Six Sigma solved 'one expert, too many stations' seventy years ago — it's called the andon cord. Yet the way we coach practitioners breaks the very principle we teach: coaches drown in lagging spreadsheets, status emails, and tollgates that were never coaching. Coaching by exception is what it looks like to finally eat our own dog food — a jidoka signal that summons the coach only when a project actually needs them.

Mike Higgins

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July 13, 2026 · 4 min read

Part 1 argued that Lean Six Sigma measures everything except the coach. Part 2 gets concrete: the three dimensions you'd actually measure — effectiveness, responsiveness, and load — and the two rules that keep it from curdling into surveillance.

Mike Higgins

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July 7, 2026 · 4 min read

Lean Six Sigma runs on one conviction: you can't improve what you don't measure. Yet we never measure the one variable that may matter most — the coach. Part 1 of a two-part look at why coaching has gone unmeasured, and why the old excuses no longer hold.

Mike Higgins

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July 1, 2026 · 7 min read

Despite 20 years of explosive growth in training and certification, the Lean Six Sigma project failure rate has barely moved. That's the tell: failure isn't a knowledge problem you can train away — it's a coaching-ratio math problem. Here's the arithmetic, and why it's so hard to fix.

Mike Higgins

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June 24, 2026 · 5 min read

Lean Six Sigma exists to build problem-solving capability that compounds across an organization. AI can accelerate that — or quietly spend it down. The difference between a compounding return on AI and a depreciating one comes down to a single choice: develop the practitioner, or fill in the form.

Mike Higgins

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June 23, 2026 · 5 min read

The practitioners who succeed and the ones who stall learned the same methodology. The real constraint is coaching — and what you do in the gap when the coach isn't there. Here are the three things practitioners fall back on, and why each one quietly costs the project.

Mike Higgins

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June 23, 2026 · 5 min read

Being "stuck" on a Lean Six Sigma project is a symptom, not a diagnosis — and being stuck in Define is a different problem from being stuck in Analyze. A Master Black Belt's phase-by-phase guide to pinpointing exactly where your DMAIC project is blocked, and the one question that clears it.

Mike Higgins

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May 8, 2026 · 3 min read

Generic AI chatbots tell you your charter is 'excellent' and your root cause analysis is 'insightful.' It feels good — but an AI that's engineered to please you is exactly how continuous improvement projects lose their guardrails. Real Lean Six Sigma mastery requires a coach that challenges your thinking, not one that flatters it.

Mike Higgins

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May 4, 2026 · 9 min read

AI is now part of how Lean Six Sigma work gets done — but using it as an answer-machine quietly hollows out the practitioner. New HBR research names the six forms of psychological debt, and new belts are carrying the heaviest load.

Mike Higgins

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April 12, 2026 · 8 min read

With the rise of AI, many LSS practitioners are experimenting with chatbots for guidance. But generic AI lacks the coaching architecture necessary for true LSS mastery.

Mike Higgins

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April 12, 2026 · 10 min read

You've invested in Lean Six Sigma certification. But what happens when you're staring at a real-world problem on a Tuesday morning, far more complex than any case study, and your next coaching session is days away?

Mike Higgins

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April 13, 2026 · 12 min read

You've mastered the art of the prompt, getting great answers for individual tools. But when your DMAIC project spans weeks or months, are you still getting coaching, or just a series of disconnected conversations?

Mike Higgins

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April 17, 2026 · 9 min read

AI isn't replacing Lean Six Sigma practitioners — it's reallocating them. Here's how to integrate agentic AI and automation across every DMAIC phase to amplify, not replace, human judgment.

Mike Higgins

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April 19, 2026 · 5 min read

Most LSS projects stall not because the methodology fails, but because friction defeats it. Here's how AI and workflow automation can finally make the right thing to do the easy thing to do.

Mike Higgins

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April 23, 2026 · 4 min read

We've hit the ceiling of what 'prompting' can achieve. The future of Lean Six Sigma AI isn't a faster chatbot — it's an engineering-grade harness that protects the Thread of Integrity from charter to control plan.

Mike Higgins

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