Most hospital quality dashboards are designed to answer one question: Are we OK? Green means yes. Red means no. The trouble is, once the answer is green, nobody asks the more useful question: what did we do, and is it…
Process Behavior Charts help leaders distinguish signal from noise in their metrics, so they can stop overreacting to routine variation and focus on real improvement. Instead of asking people to explain every up and down in performance, these charts provide a…
The Christmas Tale / Le Conte de Noël Two years ago, I received an unexpected and incredibly specific Christmas gift from Charles Desneuf on LinkedIn. He wrote a PDF eBook about Process Behavior Charts… and Christmas! This led to Charles…
tl;dr summary: Early adoption of Process Behavior Charts would have changed how organizations approached Lean–reducing noise-driven reactions, improving root cause analysis, and helping leaders focus on true signals. Lean would have had a clearer path, and many transformations might have…
tl;dr: A healthcare CEO explains how Process Behavior Charts replaced reactive metric debates with clarity, trust, and focused improvement by separating signal from noise. “Every month, we’re buried in data–and yet somehow, we’re still arguing over whether there’s actually a…
tl;dr: Run charts and bar charts can hint at patterns, but they often mislead. A Process Behavior Chart reveals whether a KPI truly changed–or if it’s just fluctuating as systems do. When leaders see variation clearly, they can react less,…
tl;dr Color codes and bar charts answer “Are we hitting the target?” but not “Are we improving?” or “How do we improve?” Process Behavior Charts reveal true signals in the data, so leaders stop overreacting to noise and start improving…
tl;dr summary: Rare events like MLB perfect games are hard to analyze with simple counts. Process Behavior Charts–especially “days between events”–reveal real signals without overreacting to randomness. In my book Measures of Success, I share what I’ve learned about the…
Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more My guest for Episode #452 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is Luke Szyrmer. He’s the founder of “Launch Tomorrow.” He helps new technology products get to market faster (even remotely).…
Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more My guest for Episode #441 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is John Dues, an accomplished education systems leader and improvement science scholar-practitioner with more than two decades of experience in…
tl;dr: Bryce Harper’s so-called “bust” seasons weren’t busts at all–they were normal variation. When you plot his monthly OPS on a Process Behavior Chart, the data show consistent performance with a few true signals, not a decline. The problem isn’t…
tl;dr: Red/green metrics encourage snap judgments and overreaction. Process Behavior Charts provide context, separate signal from noise, and help leaders make better decisions that reduce wasted effort and drive real improvement. Thanks again to Prof. Eric Olsen for inviting me…