Week 5: Lean Six Sigma Certifications Are Mostly Worthless. Fight Me.
Lean Six Sigma Certifications Are Mostly Worthless. Fight Me.
I am a Master Black Belt.
I have spent 20+ years in Continuous Improvement. I have trained over 300 practitioners -- Green Belts, Black Belts, and everything in between. I have designed certification programmes, assessed competency, and mentored people through their projects at Shell, Johnson Controls, KCA Deutag, and dozens of other organisations.
And I am telling you: the Lean Six Sigma certification industry has become a credentialing factory that produces certificate holders, not problem solvers.
Fight me on this. I want you to.
Because if you disagree, I need you to answer one question first: How many certified Black Belts do you know who have never delivered a single meaningful financial result?
Be honest. Not "they worked on a project that was part of a larger programme." Not "they contributed to a team that achieved savings." How many certified Black Belts do you know who can personally point to a problem they identified, a root cause they uncovered, and a solution they implemented that delivered measurable, sustained results?
In my experience? Maybe one in three. At best.
The other two thirds have a certificate, a LinkedIn badge, and a project report that gathered dust the moment it was signed off.
How the Belt System Broke
The belt system was never supposed to be a credentialing industry. When Motorola and GE developed Six Sigma in the 1980s and 1990s, the belts were tied to real projects with real financial targets. A Black Belt was someone who had delivered results, not someone who had passed an exam.
Then the market saw an opportunity.
Training companies realised they could sell certifications. Lots of them. To lots of people. At premium prices. And the easiest way to sell more certifications was to make them easier to get.
So the bar dropped.
Week-long courses became the standard. Then four-day courses. Then online courses you could complete in your own time while watching Netflix. Project requirements became softer. Mentoring became optional. Financial validation became a box-ticking exercise rather than a genuine audit.
The result? A market flooded with certified practitioners who have never solved a real problem in a real organisation under real pressure.
I interviewed a Black Belt candidate once -- this was for a CI role at a major energy company. He had his certification from a reputable provider. He could describe DMAIC perfectly. He knew his statistics. On paper, he was excellent.
I asked him to walk me through his certification project. He described a process improvement at a logistics company. It sounded good. Then I asked: "What happened when you implemented the solution? What resistance did you face?"
He paused. "We did not actually implement it. The project was completed at the improve phase. Implementation was going to be handled by the operations team."
He had a Black Belt certification based on a project that was never implemented. Never tested in reality. Never sustained. Never measured for actual results.
This is not an outlier. This is the norm.
What the Belt Chasers Miss
Here is what I have observed across 300+ practitioners I have personally trained and mentored.
The best ones -- the ones who delivered extraordinary results, who went on to lead transformations, who made a genuine difference -- did not care about the belt. They cared about the problem.
They were obsessed with understanding why something was going wrong. They spent more time on the shopfloor than in the training room. They asked questions that made people uncomfortable. They challenged assumptions that everyone else had accepted as fact.
And many of them were frustrated by the certification process because it felt like bureaucracy layered on top of what should have been straightforward problem solving.
The worst ones -- the ones who completed the training and delivered nothing -- were obsessed with the certification. They wanted the badge. The LinkedIn credential. The line on their CV. They did the minimum required to pass, selected projects that were safe rather than impactful, and lost all interest in improvement the moment the certificate was printed.
I am not guessing here. I have watched this pattern play out across 40+ organisations over two decades. The correlation between "cares deeply about the certification" and "delivers meaningful results" is, in my experience, negative.
The people who chase belts tend to deliver less than the people who chase problems.
The Team Leader Test
Let me give you a comparison that will make some people very uncomfortable.
I would rather hire an uncertified team leader who has eliminated three defects in the past month than a certified Black Belt who has completed all the training but never saved the organisation a dollar.
That team leader has demonstrated something the certification cannot test: the ability to see a problem, take ownership, and fix it.
They might not know what a control chart is. They might not be able to calculate process capability. They might spell "Kaizen" wrong. But they have done the one thing that actually matters in CI: they have improved something.
The certified Black Belt might know all the theory. They might pass every exam. But if they have never applied it to a real problem and delivered a real result, what exactly is the certification certifying?
At Shell, some of the most impactful improvements I witnessed came from operators and technicians who had no formal CI training whatsoever. They had common sense, proximity to the process, and an environment that allowed them to act. No charter. No tollgate. No belt.
During a deployment across 12,000 FTEs, we deliberately built structures that empowered frontline people to make small improvements without any certification requirement. The volume and velocity of improvement that came from those people -- uncertified, untrained in formal methodology -- far exceeded what came from the structured Black Belt projects.
The Black Belt projects were larger. More complex. More financially significant individually. But the aggregate impact of hundreds of small improvements driven by people who simply cared about their work was greater.
What Should Replace It
I am not saying training is worthless. I am not saying methodology does not matter. I am not saying you should throw out structured problem solving and just wing it.
I am saying that the current certification model is optimised for revenue generation by training providers, not for capability building in organisations.
Here is what I think should replace it.
Certification should require implementation, not just completion. If your project was never implemented, you have not demonstrated the ability to improve anything. You have demonstrated the ability to write a report. Those are different skills.
Financial results should be validated independently. Not signed off by your mentor who needs you to pass. Validated by finance. With real numbers. Auditable.
Recertification should be based on continued delivery. Not attending another training course. Not collecting CPD points by watching webinars. Show me what you improved this year. Show me the results. If you cannot, the certification should lapse.
Training should spend 80% of its time on application and 20% on theory. Currently it is inverted. People spend weeks learning tools and hours applying them. It should be the opposite. Learn a tool in the morning, apply it to a real problem in the afternoon. Every single day.
The emphasis should shift from individual certification to team capability. CI is not a solo sport. The best improvements come from teams. Yet the certification system is entirely focused on individual achievement. Certify teams. Certify departments. Certify the collective ability to identify problems and solve them together.
Why I Built Something Different
When I created the Stormholt CI Mastery Toolkit, I deliberately designed it to be the opposite of a certification factory.
No belt at the end. No exam. No credential you can paste on LinkedIn.
Instead: 25 professional templates that make you more effective at solving real problems. Tools you can use tomorrow. On a real process. With real data. To deliver a real result.
Because after 20+ years and $1 billion in documented savings, I have learned that what matters is not what is on your CV. It is what is on the shopfloor.
Here is my challenge to every certified Black Belt reading this: When was the last time you personally identified a problem, investigated the root cause, implemented a solution, and measured the sustained result? If you cannot answer that, your certification is a piece of paper. Prove me wrong.
Skip the credential, build the capability. The Stormholt CI Mastery Toolkit gives you 25 professional templates to start solving real problems today.
https://stormholt.org/products/ci-mastery-toolkit