Process Behavior Charts help leaders distinguish real signals from routine noise in performance data. Instead of reacting to every up or down, these charts—rooted in the work of Shewhart and Deming—show when a system has truly changed and when variation is simply part of normal performance.
These posts explore Process Behavior Charts in practical, leadership-focused ways: avoiding overreaction to red metrics, improving decision-making, building trust in data, and shifting conversations from blame to system improvement. Examples span healthcare, manufacturing, sports, and executive dashboards—where misunderstanding variation often leads to wasted effort and worse outcomes.
Many of the ideas in this archive align with the themes of my book Measures of Success: reacting less to routine variation, leading better through better questions, and improving more by focusing on system change instead of noise.
A pitch from a personal injury law firm showed up in my inbox. The subject line was about older workers dying on the job. The numbers were real. I checked them against the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Census of Fatal…
The target printed on the chart was zero percent. The red line had never been near zero. Not in the nine months posted on the wall, and probably not in any month before them. It sat between 6.43% and 6.98%.…
TL;DR: The NHS backlog gets narrated one month at a time, and millions in bonus money ride on the moves. A Process Behavior Chart shows most movement is noise — and the trusts that stay on top are running structurally…
MLB’s first month with robot umpires gave us a 7.3% jump in walks, a five-minute increase in average game time, and a series of headlines asking you to have an opinion. Most of the leaders I respect would shrug. That…
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…
A hospital VP I worked with once told her board the number of infections had dropped from 4 to 3. She got a small round of congratulations. The next quarter, it went to 5, and she had to explain what…
tl;dr: The “two consecutive reds” rule persists because reacting feels like leadership — but it generates wasted investigations, false success stories, and eroded trust. Process Behavior Charts tell you when variation actually means something changed. I’m writing about something that…
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: Headlines say kickoff returns are “dramatically up” in 2025, but process behavior charts show this isn’t random fluctuation. The NFL’s new dynamic kickoff rules created a true signal — proof that system changes drive performance, just as Lean teaches…
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…
Recently, I saw someone reference a chapter from Dr. W. Edwards Deming’s book Out of the Crisis on LinkedIn–Chapter 11, titled “Common Causes and Special Causes of Improvement. Stable System.” It was a good nudge for me to revisit a…
tl;dr: If leaders have to “do the math in their heads” to see trends, the chart isn’t doing its job. Bowling charts hide signals and exaggerate noise. Process Behavior Charts reveal what’s really happening so leaders can react less, learn…
