When a company completes its second round of layoffs in eighteen months, the natural next step is to hire consultants to help the remaining employees work more efficiently. This is called operational excellence. It costs between $800,000 and $2 million, and it begins with a kickoff meeting where a partner from the consulting firm explains Lean Six Sigma to a room full of people who are already doing the work of two or three people.
The remaining employees nod politely. They have learned that nodding politely is a survival skill.
The Pattern
The sequence is remarkably consistent across industries. First, there are layoffs. They are described as a "difficult but necessary step" in an all-hands email that thanks the departed for their contributions. Then comes the mandate: do more with less. This is stated as though it were an insight rather than arithmetic. The people still employed absorb the work of those who left. They figure it out. They always do.
Then, three to six months later, leadership brings in Lean Six Sigma consultants. The stated goal is to "identify inefficiencies and streamline operations." The unstated goal is to produce a slide deck that justifies the headcount reduction retroactively and creates the appearance of a strategy where there was only a budget cut.
The remaining staff are required to attend 40 hours of certification workshops. These hours come on top of their existing workloads, which have already expanded to fill the gaps left by their former colleagues. They learn about value stream mapping, kaizen events, and the five types of waste. They do not learn about the sixth type of waste, which is attending a 40-hour workshop while your actual work piles up.
They are then asked to map their own processes and identify "waste." The processes are already skeletal. What was once a three-person workflow is now one person doing all three steps. The "waste" they are being asked to find is, in most cases, essential work being performed by someone who is already stretched thin.
The Kaizen Workshop Paradox
The kaizen workshops are where things get particularly instructive. Employees are gathered into cross-functional teams and asked to brainstorm improvements to their workflows. They take this seriously. They put sticky notes on whiteboards. They identify root causes. They propose solutions.
The most common suggestion, across every engagement we reviewed, is "hire more people." This is categorized as "out of scope."
The second most common suggestion is "fewer meetings about process improvement." This is also categorized as "out of scope."
The suggestions that remain in scope tend to involve updating a shared document, consolidating two email templates into one, or moving a status report from Tuesday to Wednesday. These are presented to leadership as "quick wins." They are written up with estimated annual savings figures that assume every employee values their time at their fully loaded cost rate, a calculation that has never once resulted in anyone receiving money.
The Numbers
A typical Lean Six Sigma engagement at a mid-size company runs $800,000 to $2 million, depending on the firm and the duration. The consultants are on-site for six to twelve months. They are professional, credentialed, and thorough. They produce binders.
The average number of processes actually changed as a result of the engagement: three to five. Most changes involve documentation — new standard operating procedures, updated workflow diagrams, revised approval matrices. These documents add two to four hours per week to already-overloaded roles.
The consultants leave. Within 90 days, the documentation stops being updated. The SOPs drift out of alignment with actual practice. The process maps become artifacts. Someone prints one out and pins it to a corkboard in a conference room where it will yellow quietly for the next three years.
The company reports the engagement as a success in the next quarterly review. The savings figures are projected, not actual. The attrition that occurred during the rollout — typically 4% to 8% above baseline — is attributed to "market conditions."
What Remains
The people who survive two rounds of layoffs and a Lean transformation are remarkably resilient. They have adapted to shifting priorities, absorbed extra responsibilities, attended the workshops, filled out the process maps, and continued to deliver work that keeps the company running. They did this while being asked to prove, on paper, that their own workflows contained waste.
They are also, almost without exception, looking for other jobs. Not because they are disloyal. Because they have been through enough organizational change to recognize the pattern, and they know that the next step after "operational excellence" is usually another round of cuts, rebranded as something new.
The consultants, meanwhile, have moved on to the next engagement. The company down the road just finished its second round of layoffs. Leadership there wants to "do more with less." They've heard good things about Lean Six Sigma.