The DMAIC Investment Problem
70% of your DMAIC initiatives fail to deliver sustained results because the methodology is incomplete. It's missing causality from the most important dataset: how your people are making decisions.
DMAIC optimizes processes executed by people whose decision-making patterns, stress responses, and psychological compatibility remain invisible variables that undermine every improvement.
What DMAIC Misses
"Psychology helps us to understand people, interaction between people and circumstances, interaction between a manager and his people and any system of management." - W Edward Deming
Define:
Assumes stakeholder understanding and commitment.
Misses resistance and purpose alignment—starting the pathway to nowhere.
Measure:
Captures process metrics.
Ignores human decision patterns creating those metrics.
What are people choosing that goes missing?
Analyze:
Identifies workflow bottlenecks.
Misses psychological friction that creates workarounds—which become dead ends without human context.
Improve:
Designs solutions for ideal conditions.
Two people hear the same improvement plan but execute completely differently based on mindset, traits, and dysfunction.
Under pressure, fear-driven versus purpose-driven people produce vastly different results.
Control:
Monitors regression but can't predict or prevent it.
Mental capacity and purpose drivers remain unmeasured variables.
Result:
With the right people, you see problems long in advance. With the wrong people in sufficient quantities, you don't execute consistently or at all.
Some companies go decades without profit—which is a waste of human capacity.
Process alone doesn't resolve the problem.
The Stealth Dog Labs Enhancement
We add remote psychological intelligence to each DMAIC phase, transforming process optimization into human capital optimization.
Enhanced Define:
Map stakeholder psychology before problem definition.
Predict readiness for change complexity.
Focus efforts where you expect results first.
Elevate the coalition of the willing.
Enhanced Measure:
Capture decision-making patterns that create process metrics on individual and team levels using remote data acquisition.
Measure cognitive load and stress impact.
Enhanced Analyze:
Distinguish psychological versus technical root causes.
Analyze stakeholder interaction dynamics based on mindset compatibility.
Enhanced Improve:
Design solutions matching cognitive capacity and decision styles.
Ensure psychological compatibility of implementation teams.
Enhanced Control:
Monitor psychological sustainability indicators.
Predict regression before performance metrics decline.
The Multiplication Effect
Standard DMAIC: 30% success rate, temporary gains, change fatigue.
Enhanced DMAIC: 60-80% success rate, sustained performance, compound improvement effects.
McKinsey Validation: Their research shows mindset optimization creates 2.9x financial performance differential and 6x transformation success rates. We provide the remote data acquisition to drive these results systematically.
Why it works: Solutions align with human psychological reality, not just theoretical process optimization.
The Strategic Advantage
While competitors optimize processes reactively, you optimize the human factors that create process performance proactively.
Result: 6-18 months competitive lead time by predicting and preventing human-driven process failures before they occur.
Bottom Line
DMAIC without psychological causality optimizes processes people may not execute effectively. Enhanced DMAIC optimizes both processes and human capacity to execute them sustainably.
Your DMAIC investments will continue delivering temporary improvements until you address the human variables that determine whether optimized processes actually stick.