{"id":2736,"date":"2020-08-04T01:00:57","date_gmt":"2020-08-04T07:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/?p=2736"},"modified":"2021-06-21T10:40:24","modified_gmt":"2021-06-21T16:40:24","slug":"trends-are-not-always-improvements","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/trends-are-not-always-improvements\/","title":{"rendered":"Trends Are Not Always Improvements"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>Line charts with trend lines can be misleading. They can provide a kind of &#8220;false positive&#8221; that implies improvement where there is none. Here&#8217;s why:<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/400948093?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0\" width=\"720\" height=\"405\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><span data-mce-type=\"bookmark\" style=\"display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;\" class=\"mce_SELRES_start\"><\/span><\/iframe><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p>&#8220;Hi, I\u2019m Jay Arthur, author of \u201cAgile Process Innovation.&#8221;<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;I go to all these trade shows and I see a lot of poster presentations but they&#8217;re using line charts and then they draw a trend line through them and then they say, \u201cOh, we made an improvement.\u201d No you didn&#8217;t. If it doesn&#8217;t really fit the line very well, if your goodness-of-fit metric is less than 80%, I&#8217;m not buying it. But nobody gives me a goodness-of-fit metric called r-squared, they just show me a line graph or a bar chart and then they show a little line through it.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;Guess what? Trends are not improvements. Bell-bottoms, tattoos, pet rocks\u2026 these things, they\u2019re trends, but are they improvements? Let&#8217;s not confuse trends or a trend line on a chart with an improvement; it&#8217;s not. Not unless our goodness-of-fit metric is pretty dang high.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s my Improvement Insight for this week. Let&#8217;s go out and improve something.&#8221;<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Line charts with trend lines can be misleading. They can provide a kind of &ldquo;false positive&rdquo; that implies improvement where there is none. Here&rsquo;s why: &ldquo;Hi, I&rsquo;m Jay Arthur, author of &ldquo;Agile Process Innovation.&rdquo; &ldquo;I go to all these trade shows and I see a lot of poster presentations but they&rsquo;re using line charts and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":4749,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[290],"tags":[236,48,118,328,168,140,158,170,441],"class_list":["post-2736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-improvement-insights","tag-bar-chart","tag-insights-tagged-as-healthcare","tag-lean-six-sigma","tag-line-chart","tag-qi-macros","tag-quality-improvement","tag-quality-tools","tag-six-sigma","tag-trend-line"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2736"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2736\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3883,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2736\/revisions\/3883"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}