"Slavish Sick Stigma."

At GE, where I worked for a long time, Six Sigma became the established religion. You can use it, like many tools, to work more efficiently, more effectively, or both -- but there's no guarantee.

The mythology of Six Sigma always included the canonical story about GE Aircraft Engines, and how many miles an engine moved inside the plant before Six Sigma. While possibly true, this outlier of a story was not easily transferred to my component's main work (business-to-business electronic commerce).

When people worked at collecting data, probing for possible causes, testing hypotheses, and the like, that was a good thing. That was primarily at the Work Team level in your diagram, which is fine, I think: lots of day-to-day stuff happens in work teams. And sometimes they'd slide into the Community of Practice realm, as well.

When people took a project they'd pretty much finished and backed Six Sigma lingo into it -- so they could check off "completed Six Sigma project -- they were way out on the efficient end of the scale, with little on the effective end.