Where are the people in Continuous Improvement efforts?

The main motivation for organizations to embark upon continuous improvement (CI) efforts such as Lean Six Sigma (LSS) has been traditionally to improve key measures of performance (e.g. cost, speed, etc.). However, most efforts have been confronted with significant implementation failures, primarily due to the lack of proper consideration for the organizational and people-related aspects of change. Even though the need to address these key aspects has been mentioned in the literature, there appears to be theoretical and empirical gaps on both, the structural and implementation aspects of how Change Management (CM) / Organization Development (OD) are integrated into CI efforts. This paper will share the experience of how one mature organization attempted to design and deploy a framework that integrated LSS and CM/OD. This study also explores how a socio-economic approach could address the deficiencies and challenges faced by existing frameworks.