“What if I were to tell you that one of the most important keys to your organization’s success can be found in a very unlikely place—a place many of you may consider to be complicated, inaccessible, and perhaps even downright boring? What if I were to tell you that this key to success is already one of the most ubiquitous and impactful forces in your organization? It’s there, waiting for you to tap into it. This key to success is measurement.”

As a consultant, it’s easy to lose touch with reality and become a platitude-spouting machine. I always like hearing from my readers because it keeps me grounded—and I try my best to reply to them all. My heart lies with the hard-working front-line folks doing the real work.

At the end of my December 2012 column, “Evolving Beyond Platitudes to Holistic Improvement,” I described three different management styles.

Previously I discussed three common cause strategies (links below) that help to expose all existing, underlying special causes of variation. They also provide necessary insight into how the current process came to be and allow construction of a baseline for assessing the effects of an intervention.