Before the Performance Review.
Before the Termination Letter.

Someone got fired.

Or didn't get the promotion. Or got the performance review that changed everything. Or made the decision that led to someone else's consequences.

In most of those moments, somewhere upstream, there was a signal that nobody saw.

Not because the signal didn't exist. Because the chain that should have carried it upward was broken, incomplete, or never built in the first place.

The Measurement Failure Dressed as a People Failure

Deming said it in 1986. 94% of problems belong to the system. 6% belong to the people.

Organisations have spent the decades since finding increasingly sophisticated ways to identify, document, and act on the 6%.

The 94% — the system problems, the broken signal chains, the measurement gaps that made the failure invisible until it was too late — those were filed under management lessons learned and carried quietly into the next cycle.

The person who was blamed carried something heavier.

What the Signal Would Have Shown

Before the performance failure became visible, there was a period when the signal was moving outside its normal range.

A week where the numbers were trending in the wrong direction. A month where the variance was building. A pattern that, if anyone had been reading it, would have prompted a conversation — not a consequence.

That conversation would have asked what was happening in the environment. What pressures the person was working under. What the system was doing to them that they couldn't control.

The XmR chart shows the variance. The CPL fires early — weeks before the system reaches a limit. The investigation log captures the context. The person is not the finding.

The system is where you look first.

What This Changes

When the signal chain is built and working, the performance review is not a surprise.

The manager already knows what the signal has been doing for three months. The person already knows what their own data shows. The conversation that follows is about the pattern and the environment — not about defending a number that arrived without context.

The termination letter that nobody wanted to write — in many cases, it was written because nobody saw the signal in time to write a different letter instead.