Roger. Thank you for writing the article. A question, and sorry for the length.

When I think of SPC or SQC, I see those as applying to more deterministic or repeatable processes - e.g. a manufacturing process or something similar. The process is designed for repeatability and thus you can talk about special cause and common cause variation. i.e you know with high confidence how the system will perform and you monitor it for that.

But in a strategy, you don’t have all that. You haven’t designed the strategy in the same way you’d design a process and it’s not like you’re going to do the thing 100 times etc. to be able to measure variation.

It’s a hypothesis on how to succeed. You can have some kind of “control limits” for each WWHTBT, but that’s not variation. That’s still a hypothesis. But one you will monitor along the way. e.g. as you say - “Or, with the increasing scale anticipated in our strategy, we can get our costs down 50% in the next three years might mean that we must get costs down (say) 12% within the first year.”

That 50% and that 12% is just a hypothesis, but one you’ve decided is a measure of success. You’ve never done this before, so how do you know this is the right number? You don’t. So is SPC/SQC, Special Cause and Common Cause the right analogy?