Managing with Control Charts

Ideas from the Tiger's Head by Simon Caulkin, The Observer. This is a remarkably nuanced short article on control charts given that it is a newspaper article (which normally overly simplify such concepts to the point not much of value is left).

This is a critical distinction: if managers mistakenly tamper with a stable process, believing an occurrence is exceptional, they introduce an external cause, which destabilises it. Targets do the same thing.

If a system is stable, as a matter of logic you can only force it to deliver a target beyond its limits by improving it, distorting it or fiddling the numbers.

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