Improvement Insights Blog

People often worry about how they are going to get their leadership on board with using control charts. It’s easy. Here’s how:

“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma For Hospitals” and QI Macros [software].

“I was on a presentation and I was watching Zoom and I was looking at the chat window to see what people were asking, and somebody said, “Well, how do I get my leadership team on board with using control charts?” I have a simple answer for that: Start using them. Right?

“The moment you start using control charts, your leadership team will say, “Oh, what’s that for, and what are these lines for?” Then you can talk about it: “Well, this is a way to tell if what’s going on here is stable or unstable, and there’s something we need to attend to, or if it’s just fine…” You can go into as much depth as they want, but they usually don’t want to know, right? But if you get them used to watching it and then you say, “Look, this thing’s starting to go out of control and we need we need to attend to that.” “Oh, okay.” Then they’ll look at something else and it’s going along and they say, “Oh, that number is too low,” and you say “Well, it’s still in statistical process control; it hasn’t gone crazy yet.” We know there are rules that tell us when things are going crazy.

“I can tell you from experience that all you have to do is start using them, and then you can explain them, and then they’ll start to see how useful they are. One woman came up to me at a conference and said, “After your presentation at NAHQ in 2018, we went back and we ripped out all of our line charts and we put in control chart dashboards from QI Macros, and it made it so much easier to run the hospital!”

“So if you want to know how to start doing this, don’t tell them; just start using the Tools of Quality. It’s just that simple.

“Let’s create a hassle-free America; hassle free healthcare. Let’s go out and improve something this week.”