About the Process:

Note: This book will be written and published using the "continuous publishing" model. Early buyers of the book will get a lower price and will have the opportunity to give feedback to the authors. You'll also receive updates about new chapters being added or significant changes being made and you'll get to download the latest version. The price will go up over time, with an expected recommended price for the completed book being $9.99. In the LeanPub model, you can choose to pay less or pay more, which we think is an interesting experiment. Thanks for being a part of it!

About the Book:

While this might sound like a book on statistics, it's really a book about management and leadership. "Variation" is a topic that is not well understood by most managers and leaders. As a result, we end up wasting time and frustrating employees. For example, we react to data and ask people to develop detailed explanations for a data point that is, essentially, noise in the system. Or, worse, we blame an individual instead of better understanding the system and its underlying processes.

This book builds upon lessons from W. Edwards Deming, Joseph Juran, Donald Wheeler, and others along with experience of the authors in healthcare. The book aims to answer questions such as:

• What is variation and how do we see it whether we have data or not?
• Why is it important to better understand and manage variation in our daily management practices?
• What are some specific methods that healthcare organizations and leaders can use to better understand and manage variation?
• Based on this understanding, how can we make better decisions and lead our organizations from frustration and chaos into prosperity?

The book is meant to be a “pracademic” guide – partly academic, but mostly practical in terms of the lessons and techniques that the reader can apply in their daily work. Our goals with the book, as Dr. Deming taught us, are to learn something, make a difference, and have some fun while doing so.

Planned Table of Contents:

• The basics of "understanding variation"
• The management problems that result from not viewing data as a time series
• How to properly analyze and react to time series data
• The proliferation of statistical process control charts and the problems that can cause
• Principles of understanding variation apply when you don’t have data