Telling a Good Story


I recently came across a fantastic news story in one of our process improvement efforts. Unfortunately, the effort and accomplishment was not fully appreciated -- due in part to the way the information was presented. Month after month, we presented the change as an unadorned bar chart. The bar chart showed clear improvements, but the sense of story was lacking.

After working with the team, we applied three recommendations to improve how the information was communicated.
1. We added control limits to the chart to convey a sense of context. How do we know when something changed? When the line breaks the control limits, something has changed.
2. We decided to show both the meter (the # of expired LIMDU PRDs) and the levers (the actions we had taken to influence change).
3. We made the math easy. Senior leadership no longer needs to calculate the size of the impact or guess; we spelled out the accomplishment explicitly.

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