NOISE: a quick weekly operations check

Needs, opportunities, improvements, strengths and exceptions. A short, solution-focused check for a shop, distributor or dealer to run every week.

Where it comes from: not established. NOISE is a practitioners’ tool, not an academic one, and we could not find a paper or book that introduced it. The earliest description we found is a blog post by Mike Cardus, an organisation-development consultant, dated 12 December 2012, in which he says the idea came to him as a solution-focused alternative to SWOT; he expanded on it in October 2020. The strategy writer Jeroen Kraaijenbrink has also promoted NOISE (for example in a 2025 post), and some websites call him its inventor. We could not confirm who first created it, so we don’t credit an originator.

What it is

NOISE has five headings:

Needs: what the business needs this week to hit its goals.
Opportunities: openings outside the business you could take now.
Improvements: small, concrete fixes you can make soon.
Strengths: what is working and should be kept.
Exceptions: the times the problem didn’t happen, or the result you want already happened. Ask what was different then.

“Exceptions” comes from solution-focused practice: if a problem doesn’t happen all the time, the times it doesn’t are clues to the fix.

When to use it

NOISE is short enough for a weekly meeting of 15 minutes, which makes it fit businesses that run on daily operations:

a shopkeeper or retail stockist (1.2): stock-outs, slow movers, footfall, collections;
a wholesaler or distributor (1.3): fill rate, beat coverage, credit and collections;
an authorised dealer (2.2): enquiries to sales, service bay use, targets and schemes.

For yearly planning use SWOT and TOWS or SOAR; NOISE is for the week.

Worked example: a distributor’s fill rate

Hypothetical A distributor (1.3) aiming to fill 92% of order lines

This week shops ordered 2,600 lines (one product on one order) and the distributor filled 2,300 of them.

Fill rate this week: 2,300 ÷ 2,600 × 100 = 88.46%
Lines needed to hit 92%: 2,600 × 92% = 2,392
Short by: 2,392 − 2,300 = 92 lines
Exception, Tuesday: 640 of 660 lines filled, so 640 ÷ 660 × 100 = 96.97%

NOISE for the week. Needs: 92 more lines filled a week. Opportunities: the brand is offering extra stock on the fast movers. Improvements: reorder the top 20 products every two days instead of weekly. Strengths: delivery on time. Exceptions: on Tuesday, stock had arrived on Monday and the order was checked against it before loading. Do that every day.

The exception is the most useful line: it shows a fix that already works in this business.

How to run it each week

Pick one or two numbers that matter this week (fill rate, collections, footfall, enquiries).
Spend two or three minutes on each heading. Start with strengths and exceptions if the team is discouraged.
Agree one or two improvements, with an owner, before the meeting ends.
Check them first next week.

Common mistakes

Turning it into a yearly plan. It is a weekly check; keep it short.
Skipping exceptions. They are what makes NOISE different from a complaints list.
Needs without numbers. “More sales” is vague; “92 more lines filled” is a need you can act on.
No owner for improvements. Each fix needs a name and a date.