Xanax for Managers
- Selase Dugbaza
- Jul 16, 2025
- 2 min read
Should managers be prescribed control charts instead of anti-anxiety meds?
Before you laugh, this might be the most soothing business tool you've probably never used.
Doctors should be required to prescribe control charts to every manager as an anxiety and stress management tool. Why?
Because what most managers are stressing over… is noise.
In one digital product agency (now proficient with control charts :-)), the team was being pushed hard to:
Grow to 40 clients to achieve desired revenue targets
Reduce the monthly work in progress (WIP) for efficiency gains
Reduce burnout and churn
They were missing the targets every month for three years. There was stress, finger-pointing, tighter oversight, team changes and motivational team building. Nothing worked.
Day one on the job, the control chart explained all:
Their WIP was stable, fluctuating around a mean of 20.4
WIP was within an upper control limit of 32.7 and a lower of 8.1
These aren’t signals, just normal variation, with no special cause.
Their process was doing exactly what it was designed to do.
Their failures weren’t in execution, it was in their expectations.
They didn’t know about and hadn’t heard the voice of their system, which was clearly saying:
“I don’t have the capacity for 40 clients. I’m not broken. I’m not being lazy. I’m stable. You built me this way".
Reaching 40 clients is not about pushing harder or trying harder. They’ve been treating the system's normal variation as if it were a management problem or a motivational issue, when it’s really a systemic constraint problem.
What they need is a structural change.
To achieve a client base of 40, they need to rebuild their process:
Increase system capacity (more team members? better workflows? different client mix?)
Redesign so that 40 becomes part of the normal range, not an outlier
Until then, aiming for 40 is wishful thinking, not strategy.
This is the quiet power of control charts.
“Unless you distinguish between signal and noise, you won’t be able to properly analyse and interpret your data.”
Large companies use these tools. They have the analysts, the dashboards, the operations teams.
Small to medium businesses?
They're often just doing their best with what they've got and what they know. Unfortunately, they often end up chasing every up and every down, reacting to noise and missing the insights hidden in plain sight.
It's the disadvantage of limited resources and know-how.
As Donald J Wheeler put it:
“Those who do not use control charts to analyse data will always be at a disadvantage compared to those who do”.
This isn’t just stats, it’s strategy. It’s optimisation of effort. It’s peace of mind. It’s clarity.
Clarity is what every business needs, especially SME’s.
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