Albert Einstein stated:

“The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them”

Discuss the importance of innovation and out-of-box thinking in LEAN Six Sigma.

Example of one of my friends:

Many systems are plagued by, as Milton Friedman would have put it, the tyranny of the status quo. Any single process can be analogized to a large laden shipping vessel. Once it has a lot of momentum in one particular direction, it takes a lot of energy and effort to get it to change course. If this is true of a process, it is even more so for a large organization.

This phenomenon exists for several reasons. Most workers like to expend the minimum possible energy to accomplish their tasks. Imagine a laborer who works to assemble a part which requires several movements. At first, when she is still learning the task, she is inefficient and slow but over time, her technique improves, and she becomes a model of efficiency. Any change in her process at this point she will likely resist since the skill she has developed is made obsolete by the change and she has to start, in a sense, from square one.

Another reason these course corrections are difficult is that coming up with a solution that no one has thought of requires us to think in unusual ways. This is generally difficult for us to do because one of the main products of our socialization by our peer groups as developing humans is the channeling of our thoughts and actions into those that can be considered usual. Thinking outside of the box can in some cases lead to social ostracization. Thus, it takes a concerted effort and a safe environment to coax unusual thoughts out of people. And it is these unusual thoughts that may prove to be essential to our process improvement goals.

Numerous examples of out-of-the-box thinking and its successes are readily found in the history of industry, from Ford’s assembly line, to Sony’s Walkman, to Apple’s iPhone, and more. These represent moments in industry when a company leapt forward dramatically and left its competitors scrambling to catch up. Herein lies the importance of overcoming these and other barriers to out-of-the-box thinking. It can mean being left in the dust by your competitors or leaving your competitors in the dust, in other words, success or failure.