The Squawk Point

Organisational Mechanics

  • Home
  • Blog
    • People
    • Data
    • Process
    • Wild Cards
    • Index
  • Podcast
  • Book

Global Warming? Pah!

20 January, 2010 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

I am sitting in my office, slowly turning blue, looking at a good 4 inches of snow.  I thought it was supposed to be getting warmer, the ice caps should be melting and half of East Anglia is going to be under water, yet here I am slowly freezing to death.  Clearly the scientists are idiots.

I decided to look on Wikipedia and as you can see from the chart the average global temperature has increased by about 1 degree Celsius over the past 100 years.  (The 0 degree C line represents the average temperature from 1961 to 1990, average annual temperatures are plotted relative to that, if you are interested).  Global warming is very real, it just happens to be a cold day.

All very interesting, but what has this got to do with improving your service?

Simply this, when you are measuring your performance don’t take one persons opinion, or one day’s results.  Make sure you look at several data points and draw them out as a chart then you can see the long term trend and it will be really clear if it is getting better or not.  A single point in time tells you nothing.

Filed Under: Blog, Operations Analysis Tagged With: data presentation, global warming, point measure, process control

About the Author

James Lawther
James Lawther

James Lawther is a middle-aged, middle manager.

To reach this highly elevated position he has worked in numerous industries, from supermarket retailing to tax collecting.  He has had several operational roles, including running the night shift in a frozen pea packing factory and carrying out operational research for a credit card company.

As you can see from his C.V. he has either a wealth of experience or is incapable of holding down a job.  If the latter is true this post isn’t worth a minute of your attention.

Unfortunately, the only way to find out is to read it and decide for yourself.

www.squawkpoint.com/

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Explore

accountability assumptions beliefs best practice blame bureaucracy capability clarity command and control communication complexity continuous improvement cost saving culture customer focus data is not information decisions employee performance measures empowerment error proofing fessing up gemba human nature incentives information technology innovation key performance indicators learning management style measurement motivation performance management poor service process control purpose reinforcing behaviour service design silo management systems thinking targets teamwork test and learn trust video waste

Receive Posts by e-Mail

Get the next post delivered straight to your inbox

Creative Commons

This information from The Squawk Point is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Creative Commons Licence
Customer Experience Update

Try This:

  • Fish Bone Diagrams – Helpful or Not?

  • Should You Punish Mistakes?

  • Best-of-Breed

  • Blame or Solutions?

Connect

  • E-mail
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
  • YouTube
  • Cookies
  • Contact Me

Copyright © 2025 · Enterprise Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in