Lean Six Sigma Black Belt Readiness: Lead the Program, Master the Statistics
Signature Course No. 404 — A Signature AI Socratic Coaching Course.
For Green Belts and program leads — your coach starts where you stand.
A New Kind of Learning
Socratic coaching, delivered by an agentic AI coach.
Not a course you watch. An AI coach you work with.
The Lighthouse Coach begins by discovering how you think about the subject, teaches what is missing, and gives you realistic practice before asking you to prove that you can use it. You may test out of concepts you already understand, while capstones turn the learning into a practical plan, decision, conversation, or other real-world result.
The curriculum is deliberately authored; the AI delivers it through coaching. It is not an AI randomly generating lessons.
A coach that teaches by asking — not by lecturing
The Lighthouse Coach is an AI Socratic coach built on Cognosco Learning's Lean Six Sigma Black Belt Readiness: Lead the Program, Master the Statistics course, in the Frontline & Industry Leadership category. It does not play videos at you. It holds a conversation: it asks you a question, listens to your answer, names the misconception it hears, affirms what you got right, and asks the next question — the way a great coach works in the room.
No single project, however brilliant, redeems a program that selects badly, governs loosely, coaches rarely, and claims benefits nobody validated. A Green Belt leads a project. A Black Belt leads the system that produces projects — and carries the statistics the system's hardest problems require. This course builds that person, on one running program: Trevarra Components, a fictional manufacturer with fourteen active Green Belt projects, six Black Belt-led projects, and a claimed benefit ledger of $1,840,000 of which Finance has so far validated $960,000 as hard savings.
It starts with the seat. A Black Belt owns a result, the leaders producing the other results, and the standard by which all of them will be judged — results, people, and standards, three accountabilities that fail in different ways. Your authority is real but borrowed: method authority and convening authority, not line authority. You will learn to hold the three apart, to allocate your time across your own projects, coaching, and the system, and to be the program's memory and conscience.
It works in two movements. First, Module 1 — Lead the Program — work through Concepts 1–9, finishing with The Portfolio You Can Govern; then, Module 2 — Master the Statistics — work through Concepts 10–18, finishing with The Analysis You Can Defend.
Both capstones produce real artifacts — a portfolio governance pack for the Trevarra program: seat statement, validated ledger, tollgate design, one coaching record, and a dashboard and stall watch; and an advanced analysis dossier in which every design, test, and chart is chosen, computed, and defended, with every figure recomputable from what is printed in it.
The honesty standard is part of the course. Certifying bodies differ in their Black Belt bodies of knowledge, and this course teaches the common core those bodies share at the level above Green Belt. Alignment is not endorsement: no body endorses this course, completing it awards no belt, and no page promises that you will pass an examination. Every worked table and figure in the course recomputes from its printed inputs, so you can rebuild each one yourself.
The course is self-paced and always on — roughly 30 minutes per concept, about 9 hours in full, taken in as many sittings as you like. You can type your answers, or talk out loud: the Voice Coach speaks its questions and listens to your spoken replies. Learners who already know the material can test out concept by concept.
Lean Six Sigma Black Belt Readiness: Lead the Program, Master the Statistics is part of The Lighthouse Signature Series — the online counterpart to the one-day, in-person learning Cognosco Learning has delivered since 2002.
Course Facts
One full concept, coached end to end — free: verify your email and we’ll send you a link to start.
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Diagnose → Learn & Practice → Prove → Capstone
Every learner moves through the same discipline a Cognosco instructor would insist on in the room.
Diagnose
The Coach starts where the course starts: with the seat itself. Recall an improvement effort you watched from outside and say who owned results, people, and standards — and what happened to the one nobody owned; rule which authority you actually hold when a plant manager tells you to order a Green Belt to change her scope; count last month's hours across your own work, developing others, and the system. Every concept opens with three questions that locate where you actually stand, and your answers shape how deeply the Coach works the concept with you. Everyone begins with Module 1 — no skipping the foundations you only think you have.
Learn & Practice
Work each concept in conversation with the Coach — spoken or written — then practice it against realistic situations until it holds up.
Prove
Every concept ends in proof: answer the check cold and demonstrate the skill. Know it already? Test out and take credit immediately.
Capstone
Finish with two capstones — The Portfolio You Can Govern for Module 1 and The Analysis You Can Defend for Module 2 — that pull the whole course together, and earn the certificate.
What You'll Learn
Select the set, govern the system, state every number at its real strength — in that order, every time. Every skill in this course is the same discipline at a higher level: choose before you compute, judge the set and not just the member, and let no figure carry more certainty than the evidence under it earned.
Module 1 — Lead the Program. The Black Belt Seat; Choosing the Portfolio; Tollgate Governance Across Many Projects; Coaching Green Belts to Standard; Benefits Validation with Finance; Change Leadership Without Authority; Designing the Improvement System; Program Measures That Resist Gaming; When the Portfolio Stalls — what the Black Belt seat owns, how a portfolio is chosen and balanced, how tollgates govern at scale, how benefits are validated in Finance's language, and how a stalling portfolio is diagnosed and recovered.
Module 2 — Master the Statistics. Full Factorial Design and Analysis; Fractional Factorials and Aliasing by Design; Response Surface Method; Nonparametric Tests; Multiple Regression Diagnostics; Logistic Regression; EWMA and CUSUM; Short-Run Charts; Design for Six Sigma at Judgment Level — experiments with more factors than observation can separate, surfaces you climb and then model, tests that drop the normality assumption, regressions you diagnose instead of merely fit, and control charts built for slow drift and for short production runs.
And it holds its boundary throughout. The Green Belt body of knowledge — DMAIC project execution end to end — is assumed fluency here, owned by its own course in this catalog. This course spends its pages where a Green Belt graduate cannot yet go: the portfolio, the program, and the statistics past the Green Belt border.
What you will learn
- Select and balance an improvement portfolio, and state its expected benefit as recomputable arithmetic agreed with Finance
- Govern many projects through tollgates with one evidence standard, and recover a portfolio that is stalling
- Coach and review Green Belts so their next project is stronger than their last review
- Validate benefits with Finance — hard savings, cost avoidance, and capacity — each at its real strength
- Design a deployment: belt capacity, cadence, program measures, and escalation that survive scrutiny
- Design and analyze full and fractional factorial experiments, stating aliasing correctly and choosing resolution on purpose
- Climb and model a response surface, and select nonparametric tests when distributional assumptions fail
- Diagnose multiple regression, interpret logistic regression in odds, and build EWMA, CUSUM, and short-run charts correctly
- Judge when design for Six Sigma applies, and audit your readiness against the common Black Belt core
Everything in the course
- All 18 concepts of Lean Six Sigma Black Belt Readiness: Lead the Program, Master the Statistics, in 2 modules
- A starting-point check first — the Coach finds where you actually stand before teaching
- Learn, Practice, Prove for every concept — no passive video watching
- A test-out on every concept: prove you know it and move on
- The Voice Coach: talk with the Coach out loud — it speaks, listens, and replies
- A personal Learner Record of your work across the course
- Two capstone exercises: The Portfolio You Can Govern and The Analysis You Can Defend
- A printable session summary whenever you pause
- The Lighthouse Coach completion certificate (Signature Series)
- Your progress is saved as you go — stop anytime, resume where you left off
Built for Green Belts stepping up to the Black Belt seat
Green Belts preparing for a Black Belt examination — with ASQ or another certifying body — who hold the Green Belt body of knowledge and need the level above it, taught as program work and advanced analysis rather than as a glossary; and practicing Black Belts and improvement program leads who govern portfolios, coach project leaders, and sign benefit claims, and need those judgments made explicit and defensible.
Quality and operations executives — who sponsor improvement programs and must judge whether a deployment design, a portfolio, or a benefit ledger deserves continued funding.
Green Belt coaches and reviewers — who read other people's tollgate evidence and need a standard for what to accept, what to send back, and how to send it back so the leader grows. This course assumes Green Belt fluency: DMAIC leadership, Green Belt statistics, and control-plan craft are prerequisites, not review topics.
Prefer to learn live and in person? The same material anchors Cognosco's one-day programs — browse the in-person catalog.
Start with The Black Belt Seat
$195 — introductory price. One payment. No subscription, no password to manage.
Here is exactly what happens when you enroll:
- Pay securely with Stripe — you are taken straight into the course
- Create your learner profile and begin the Module 1 starting-point check
- Save the access key you are given — it restores your enrollment on any device
- Learn at your pace; your progress is stored in your browser on your device
For the full voice experience, use Chrome and allow the microphone when asked. Typing your answers works everywhere, all the time. Questions before you enroll? Email hello@cognoscolearning.com.
Before you enroll
What is a Socratic coaching session?
A conversation, not a video. Your coach asks a question; you answer — out loud by voice, or by typing — and the coach responds to what you said: naming the misconception it hears, affirming what you got right, and asking the next question. You advance only when you have mastered each concept, so a finished course means the learning held.
How long does it take — and how long do I have?
About 30 minutes per concept. Learn in sittings of any length; your progress is saved as you go. You have a full year from purchase to finish, and you can revisit and retake within that year.
What does the certificate verify?
That you completed every concept and both capstones of this course. Anyone can confirm a Cognosco certificate online — enter its certificate ID on our verification page.
What if it isn't for me — what are the refunds?
If you have not started, cancel for a full refund within seven days of purchase. Once you have started, there is no cash refund — stop before finishing and we credit the full amount you paid toward any other course in the library (credit valid one year from your original purchase). Once you complete the course, no refund or credit applies.
More Signature Courses are coming
Lean Six Sigma Black Belt Readiness: Lead the Program, Master the Statistics is Signature Course No. 404. Leave your email and we'll send you news of future Signature Courses and Lighthouse updates as they are announced — nothing else.