John Dennis, Founder of ILSSI: "You Have to Be Very Agile About What Environment You Are Going to Work In"

The Process People opened its first episode with a guest whose career sits at the intersection of exactly the questions the show is built to explore. John Dennis, founder and chairman of the International Lean Six Sigma Institute (ILSSI), has spent decades inside the Lean Six Sigma and operational excellence world — first as a practitioner, then as the founder of a professional body that has quietly built one of the most internationally distributed networks in the field. He is not a typical conference keynote speaker. He is a builder, a contrarian on a handful of important things, and a pragmatist who has updated his views when the evidence demanded it.

The conversation with Alain Cohen of Famla AI covers a lot of ground in under forty minutes: the origin and purpose of ILSSI, a career-long rethink about stability and agility, an unexpected answer about blockchain, a measured but pointed take on where AI is still falling short, and a piece of advice for the next generation that challenges what most training programmes are currently teaching.

Who Is John Dennis? Founder and Chairman of the International Lean Six Sigma Institute

John Dennis founded the International Lean Six Sigma Institute — widely known as ILSSI — to address a gap that most practitioners in the field had noticed but few had acted on. The major professional bodies for Lean Six Sigma were either American by origin (ASQ, IASSC, the Council for Six Sigma Certification) or country-specific in ways that did not translate internationally. In a global economy, that structure created real problems: pricing that assumed Western salary levels, cultural framing that did not transfer, and a sense that the field's institutional infrastructure had not caught up with the global reach of the methodology itself.

ILSSI's response was to build an explicitly international partner network with pricing adapted to local economic reality. A professional in Pakistan, Argentina, or Belarus faces a fundamentally different salary structure than one in Chicago. Building a single global price for certification ignores this, and ILSSI built a tiered partner discount model to reflect it. At the time of recording, the network spans 95 partners in 42 countries, 9 university partners, and an annual conference that in its most recent edition drew attendees from 19 countries. The 2025 conference is planned for Bratislava, Slovakia, with an ambition to reach 30 countries.

The Conventional Wisdom John Dennis Abandoned: Stability Over Agility

Asked about a piece of business conventional wisdom he followed early and later discarded, John Dennis went back to the 1980s and the culture he entered when he left university in 1985. The prevailing model then was one of institutional loyalty: stay with your employer, stay in your region, treat mobility as a character flaw and stability as a virtue. His father and grandfather both built their careers this way, and the expectation was that he would too.

He followed it to a point, but came to recognise its cost. The world that rewarded long-term institutional loyalty was gone, and the practitioners who had the most impact were those who could pivot quickly, work in different environments, and update their thinking rather than defending positions they had held for decades. He extended this to physical assets too: the emotional attachment to a single house or region could become a constraint on the ability to be useful in a changing economy.

What he would add to the standard playbook for his field is not a soft skill but a hard technological shift: blockchain. John Dennis has argued for years that distributed, immutable, decentralised record-keeping could address some of the most persistent trust problems in business — the inability to verify whether a transaction was completed honestly, the ease of retrospectively altering records, and the concentration of risk in centralised database systems. His view is not that blockchain has delivered on this potential yet, but that the failure is one of adoption rather than design — and that the people best positioned to benefit from it often have the least interest in the transparency it would create.

Where John Dennis's Energy Actually Goes

Asked what a typical week looks like in practice, John Dennis gave an answer that will resonate with anyone who has spent time as a trainer or facilitator: the energy comes from the room. Being present with a group of people learning Lean Six Sigma, in a private training setting where all the structural incentives are oriented around the student rather than the faculty, is where he feels most engaged. And like most things that generate energy, it also costs it — particularly as the career extends and the physical demand of full-day facilitation accumulates.

The other significant energy consumer is the strategic challenge ILSSI continues to work against: large organisations still defaulting to the big five consulting firms for transformation and improvement work, regardless of whether smaller, more specialised partners could produce better outcomes. John Dennis has come to terms with this as a persistent structural reality rather than a problem with an imminent solution. The incumbent has the advantage. The community he has built continues to work hard to get in the room anyway.

John Dennis on AI: Valuable for Practitioners, Inaccessible to Many, Vulnerable to Misuse

Alain Cohen asked a question that sits at the heart of what Famla AI is trying to understand: at what level are leaders in your position experimenting with AI, and what has it not yet solved?

John Dennis's answer was layered. For practitioners already comfortable with technology, AI is working as a daily partner — useful, accessible, and genuinely valuable. That is not the part he finds troubling. What concerns him is the significant portion of the population that still cannot access or effectively use AI tools, not because the tools do not exist, but because the interface friction remains too high. The age gap, the education gap, and the language gap all compound into a situation where the productivity gains from AI are being captured by those who were already advantaged.

The sharper concern he raised was about integrity. AI does not make organisations more honest. It makes dishonest actors more capable. Governance failures that were already widespread do not improve because AI is available. And if the basic things — accurate accounting, ethical hiring, well-run meetings — are not being done right without AI, AI does not fix them. It amplifies whatever is already there.

John Dennis's Advice for the Next Generation: Learn It Right, Not Just Learn It

Asked what he would say to a young graduate who wants to build a career in Lean Six Sigma and transformation leadership, John Dennis gave an answer more specific than the usual "get certified and find a mentor" guidance.

Learn it from the right people. And be careful not to learn the 1980s or 1990s version that a large number of training programmes are still teaching. The original Motorola approach and the 1993 lean thinking frameworks were important contributions at the time — but they were produced in a specific industrial and economic context, and taking them too literally today produces practitioners who apply a methodology designed for a different era to a fundamentally different one. The field has evolved. The teaching has not always kept up.

What sits underneath this advice is something John Dennis has been working on for his entire career: the difference between learning a methodology as a fixed set of tools and learning it as a way of thinking. The tools change. The thinking is what produces lasting results. Agility applies to methodology as much as it applies to careers and organisations.