Being smart about reading daily, weekly, or monthly reports and using SPC thinking to properly interpret trend lines is certainly not a substitute for going to the Gemba!

I’ve never read that book (though I think you’ve mentioned it in your blog before). I completely agree that leaders often overreact to signals. Because they’re farther away from the gemba and the customers, it’s often hard for them to discern what’s really significant.

I think that’s where standard work for managers can help. By talking with front line and middle management workers on a regular basis, leaders can gain context for the signals they’re getting.

In the example of the CEO, there was the waste of gathering and creating those reports, but (speaking of signal vs. noise), how much waste was generated by leaders overreacting to signal instead of noise – reacting to “common cause” variation in the numbers instead of knowing how to look for “special causes”? Leaders tend to react to every up and down in the data, not knowing Dr. Deming’s lesson about not “tampering” with the system.

That’s why Donald Wheeler’s book “Understanding Variation” is probably the single most impactful book I’ve read in my career…