Q4: I notice as I've browsed through
your book that you mention conflicts in many places, but I didn't see any
clouds. Do you use the Thinking Process? If so did you consciously decide to not show
the tools in the book? (Two things
about this question: 1) I'm searching inside on Amazon so I may have just not
seen any TP tools, and 2) I'm not being critical of you not using the TP
tools.)
A4: I’ve often wondered how much readers can glean from Search Inside, and your question indicates that the answer is “quite a bit.” Both of your impressions are correct: Conflict resolution is one of the recurring themes throughout the book, but there are no clouds. For the benefit of readers new to TOC, “evaporating clouds” (also known as Conflict Resolution Diagrams) are a specific way to illustrate conflicts and their resolution. Thinking Process (TP) tools include clouds as well as several other diagrams. Though we did use TP tools, I decided not to show them in the book for several reasons. First, it would have made the book much longer because the target audience includes readers new to TOC, and they wouldn’t comprehend the tools without an explanation. Second, large services businesses are incredibly complicated, so the actual diagrams were too unwieldy to make good illustrations. Finally, unlike TOC applications, which had to be adapted for services, the TP tools work fine as they are. On the other hand, we had to push the TP tools farther than is typical in order to make the applications work in services. For example, Multi-Project Critical Chain (MPCC) staggers project schedules around availability of the strategic resource, yet in a services business with diverse projects it’s fairly common to have multiple cross-project resource constraints simultaneously. Likewise, both Drum-Buffer-Rope (DBR) and Replenishment manage inventory, but there is no inventory per se in a pure services business. Therefore, we had to push the TP tools pretty hard in order to adapt TOC applications to work in se
