TOC Thinkers

Do you want a FREE copy of "Reaching the Goal - How Managers Improve a Services Business Using Goldratt's Theory of Constraints"

I have one review copy of John Rickett's new Theory of Constraints book "Reaching the Goal" to give away, compliments of the publishers.

Congratulations to Grant Boston, who won the book. 

Here's my quick review:    

TOC has an outstanding record in manufacturing and here Rickett's has cleverly adopted the TOC applications and thinking to suit service industries. I know TOC well, I work in the services industry, and I've learned a lot from reading it.  It is not (imho) an easy book for TOC newbies.  I'd have liked a few more concrete examples - my mind works that way, and I hope John will add those in the 2nd edition.  It's a very good book - I suspect in a year or so once the ideas have sunk in and I've tried them - that I'll be describing it as a classic.

 

If you'd like a free copy ... then leave a brief comment below and on Tuesday morning (GMT) I'll pick the winner (randomly ).  If you are the lucky winner then I'll contact you for your details and then I'll ask the publishers to post the copy out. 

 

[I published a series of questions & answers with John about his book, here]

Alan Barnard Q&A 1

Last week I published an (updated) PDF of Alan Barnard's latest TOCICO presentation.  I found Alan's distinction between systemic and symptomatic conflicts fascinating and so I asked him to answer a few questions for this blog.

Here's the first question:

1) Alan, can you tell me a little bit about your background?  How long have you been using it? 

I graduated in 1991 with a BsC Industrial Engineering degree (Cum Laude) and was offered a job as Industrial Engineering Manager at a company called “Hendler & Hart” – the largest Stainless Steel, Aluminium and Enamel Cookware and Catering Equipment manufacturer in Southern African at the time. The Industrial Engineering department I managed was made up of 3 Industrial Engineers and 2 draftsmen with the responsibility to improve productivitiy and provide management information to enable good holistic decisions for both manufacturing (4 factories) and a distribution network that covered Southern Africa.

Where did you learn TOC? 

Only a few months after starting, I got a copy of THE GOAL from my brother Deon who was working at Iscor (Steel Manufacturer) as an Electrical Engineering Manager - Iscor was in the process of implementing Theory of Constraints at the time. As most others, I fell in love with the common sense and simple analysis processes, questions and solutions of TOC and immediately started implementing it within our company. This was in late 1992. The results were quite typical – 50% increase in Factory Throughput, increase in On-time-in-Full performance from 60% to above 95% all with the same and in some cases even less resources.

We soon incorporated the TOC rules into our MRP II system and later (when the AS400 system became to expense to maintain) developed our own full MRP system doing finite capacity scheduling with all the TOC rules and Throughput Accounting in what was considered a record at the time of only 6 months (idea to full implemantion doing all the programming ourselves).

It was during this time that our Managing Director asked me what he can give me in return for the improvement efforts I lead – the answer was simple – I wanted to learn how to think like Jonah in THE GOAL. In 1993 I attended a Jonah Program and it was during this program that I first met Dr. Eli Goldratt who was in the country doing an External Constraint Analysis workshop. During our first meeting he asked me a simple but quite profound question – what was my goal in life? Turns out that none of the goals I had set for myself at the time (e.g. to own my own company by age 30 etc) matched his definition of what a “Goal in Life is” – he told me a “Goal” is something that once you achieve it, you are ready to die…! Well, at only 24 years old, I could not imagine I would be “ready to die” ever but it really made me think. I soon realized that according to Eli’s definition (at least for me), a “Goal” could never be a destination, but it had to define a journey, and since there was always a chance that you could die at any moment, had to be verbalized in a way that you can achieve your goal every day (or at least know whether your actions that day took you closer or further away from your goal).

In the same spirit as Eli’s goal (“Teaching the world how to think”), I verbalized my own goal as – “Teaching the world (and myself) how to SEE and UNLOCK inherent potential…”

Since that day (early 1994), this is what has kept me up at night – an absolute passion to figure out what governs (limits or enables) us to SEE and UNLOCK inherent potential. In retro-spect, since that day, all my significant choices in business were driven by gaining the necessary opportunities, challenges, training and mentors to prepare me for achieving my goal. It was also obvious from the beginning to me, that TOC would play a significant part on this journey – not just learning its implications and applications but also helping with the further discovery, development and dissemination of it around the world.

After Hendler & Hart I was looking for a new (bigger) challenge. After talking through my options with Eli, I joined SABMiller where I had the opportunity to apply TOC to a company considered by most already as “World Class” and which most assumed could not be improved by much or at least not without major investments. My first challenge was to explain why the most “State-of-the-art” brewery was also the most unreliable in achieving their montly production targets. The analysis helped me make new discoveries on how to really apply TOC to the process industry as well as discoveries on common mistakes made in the design and management of breweries which I am told have changed the way many breweries today are now designed and managed.

After SABMiller I decided to go full-time into TOC consulting and education and became an associate of the Goldratt Insitute, qualifying as Jonah’s Jonah in 1998 and licensed in all the TOC applications.

In 2000, I joined the Goldratt Institute in South Africa as an executive director and shareholder.

Alan Barnard - 2003 TOCICO presentation

Download 3_new_insights_into_toc_tp_alan_barnard.zip

Alan Barnard Q&A 2

Q2) Alan, I love the idea of systematic and symptomatic clouds (although I'm starting to think of them as Cause and Consequence clouds, because I get a little confused and have to stop and think about the words systematic and symptomatic).  I've never seen the idea of separating them before.  Can you describe the difference between them and how you "discovered them"?

Probably my own new discoveries in TOC and the Thinking Processes were triggered in late 1999/early 2000 with an increasing frustration that (at least in the way we explained and applied TOC) we seemed to be moving further and further away from TOC’s fundamentals – it felt like TOC was becoming more and more complex (rather than more and more simple) and more and more difficult (rather than easier and easier to apply)…and here I include myself especially…I realized that although I received for example a fair share of compliments for my presentations some attendees always left feeling “this seems too complex or too difficult or too theoretical for us to apply”. Not only that, but I was also noticing how many “TOC practitioners” were simply not using the tools on a daily basis. When they used it, they always made breakthroughs – so why were they (we) not using it more? Initially I thought it was just me feeling this frustration, but started hearing it from more and more people – both practitioners and customers. There was a quote from Einstein that has kept me up for many nights “Everything should to made as simple as possible, but not simpler…”

I realized in some cases we were over-complicating TOC unnecessarily and in other cases, we were over-simplifying things with negative consequences on the magnitude, speed and reliability of getting step-change improvements in performance.

One such a case was the 3 Cloud process that provided the potential of a “short-cut” directly to the Core Conflict of a whole subject matter. To me, there was no doubt that this was a real breakthrough in the TP (compared to the “old way” of UDE’sà Current Reality Tree à Core Conflict) – providing much greater simplicity but also increasing significantly the speed, ease and reliability of reaching the “true core conflict and core problem(s)” of a subject matter.

At the same time, as many “success” cases I had (both in my own analysis and those of my Jonah Program students or companies for which I facilitated the 4x4 process), I also had as many cases where it felt like - when we were converging the 3 clouds into one - we were somehow “forcing it” with the resulting core conflict not really feeling as it was the deeper core conflict of the 3 UDE’s and their conflicts we started with. So I started wondering whether, in our attempts to make it simpler…we did not end up making it too simple…

I “discovered” the symptomatic and systemic clouds (or as I sometimes used to refer to them – the cause and consequence clouds -) when I was again struggling with the facilitation in a 4x4 where we used the “3 cloud approach” (using it to coverage from 20 UDE’s – one per participant in the 4x4 – to 20 clouds and then one core conflict) and suddenly realized the problem was with the instructions we were giving to participants to convert their Ude’s into conflict clouds.

When a participant was doing their cloud from their UDE the instruction (at that time) to fill in box D was “What action, related to the UDE, do you find yourself complaining about? “.

When reviewing all the work, I realized most were mixing up the answers and then we really struggled to converge the clouds. Sometimes participants were filling in the box with the answer to the question “What action are you complaining about that you think is CAUSING the UDE?” and sometimes “What action are you complaining about that YOU now feel pressure to take to deal with the CONSEQUENCES of the UDE?”

It realized that the 1^st action is a “systemic issue” and therefor part of an unresolved “systemic conflict” - while the second action was a “symptomatic issue” (trying to find a way to deal with the UDE/symptom) and must therefore be part of an unresolved “symptomatic conflict…”

Probably the words “systemic and symptomatic” was influenced by the company I was keeping at the time – I had quite a bit of discussions at the time with Prof. Antoine van Gelder, a well-known and very experienced TOC practitioner who also happens to be a doctor and who heads up the Dept of Internal Medicine at the Pretoria University. We frequently use the “patient” analogy in TOC so I thought the insight into at least two different conflicts related to every UDE, fits well with the use if systemic and symptomatic issues in the medical world.

For those who have seen my presentation at TOCICO 2003 in Cambridge where I first presented this insight, I tested my hypotheses out on Eli’s own past analysis (considered my most as typically the best TP analysis) and found that for example, in his analysis project management, Eli was in fact very consistent – but that he wrote all the “symptomatic or consequence conflicts” from the Project management UDEs – i.e. (D)contained the actions the Project Managers felt pressure to take to deal better with the Ude’s once they had happened and therefore, I believe Eli found the Core Symptomatic Conflict (i.e. Pressure to compensate for early mis-estimations vs Pressure Not to compensate...)

Well, I tried to find all the CCPM rules from breaking this Core PM Conflict, but simply could not and realized that breaking the symptomatic core conflict gives you only the new execution rules….there is really no way you could get the new planning rules from it…the only way I found was to do also the systemic conflicts for the 3 or more selected UDE’s and then find the Core systemic or planning conflict. Breaking this would then give you the new planning rules.

So, the instructions I now give is quite simple:

· For the Systemic Conflict: The question for box (D) is “What action do you think most likely caused the UDE or (if there could be more than one cause) which action/decision caused most of the UDE?” Example: If UDE is High Inventory, answer could be “Decision to make to forecast”

· For the Symptomatic Conflict: The question for box (D) is “What action do you feel most pressure to take to deal with the UDE”? Example: If UDE is High Inventory and person asked to deal with UDE is Sales Manager, the answer could be “Pressure to reduce prices (to reduce high inventory”.

Alan Barnard Q&A 3

3) Can you tell us why they are important?

I think the simple answer is that, if my hypothesis is correct, mixing the two methods will significantly impact negatively the quality of the TP analysis and using only the “Symptomatic” process (i.e. using the question “What actions do you feel pressure to take to deal with the UDE” for box D) will at best give us the Execution Conflict and therefore breaking it, we will only get what “old” execution rules we should STOP using and what “new” execution rules we should START using. If we want to know both the new PLANNING and EXECUTION rules, we should use both methods.

A summary of the insights so far include:

· If the stakeholder that has to deal with the UDE or UDE’s is the same as the one (Whose current rules are) causing the UDE or UDE’s, then the Core Systemic and Core Symptomatic Conflicts are the same but just swapped. In this exception, the “old 3 cloud process” would have found the core conflict.

· However, if the stakeholder that has to deal with the UDE or UDE’s is NOT the same as the one (Whose rules are) causing the UDE or UDE’s, then the Core Systemic/Planning and Core Symptomatic/Execution Conflicts are not the same.

· Breaking the Systemic Core Conflict will typically provide the new Planning Rules that should be used now (and the old planning rules that should not be used) while breaking the Symptomatic Core Conflict will typically provide the new Execution Rules that should be used now (and the old execution rules that should not be used).

· If breaking the Systemic Conflict will significantly reduce the UDE it relates to but will not totally eliminate this UDE (i.e. in the case where other external causes for the UDE also exist), then the Symptomatic Conflict should be broken to define the new execution rule(s) that will be used when the UDE re-occurs again in the future…

· Getting a person to write their symptomatic unresolved conflict resulting from the UDE (i.e. box D is the action they feel most pressure to deal with UDE) AND getting the person to write the systemic unresolved conflict that caused the UDE (i.e. box D is the action they feel caused their UDE in the first place) really helps them to understand and communicate their own problem (the unresolved symptomatic conflict) as well as understand better the problem of the one they are currently blaming (their unresolved systemic conflict)

 

Regarding my final choice of words –using “Systemic and Symptomatic Conflict” rather than “Cause and Consequence Conflicts” – it was probably influenced by a person that I frequently shared my thinking with at the time - Prof. Antoine van Gelder, head of the Dept of Internal Medicine at Pretoria Academic University and one of the pioneers in applying TOC to hospitals. As you know, the “Systemic” and “Symptomatic” terms are used mainly in medicine.

Systemic – an issue affecting an entire system (distinct from an issue having only a local effect)

Symtomatic – characteristic or indicative of an underlying disease; relating to a symptom

The winner is ...

Grant Boston is the lucky winner of John Rickett's new TOC book.  The publishers will be posting it out to him shortly.

Q&A with Bill Dettmer - Q4 - The life of a TOC trainer / consultant

Some more questions with TOCthinker Bill Dettmer ...

Q4:  Thanks for answering the earlier questions Bill.  The generated a lot of interesting feedback.  I want to move away from the book now and ask you about your training courses.  To start with, can you tell me a little more about the people who come to the courses?  What do they hope to achieve?  Are they already converts to TOC?  What do you learn from giving the courses?

It's an interesting mix of people from private and public sectors. In my last course I had a strategic planner for a county in New Mexico, and an information technology project manager from a large German conglomerate. Most of those who contact me about training already have some familiarity with TOC. A few don't but they may have read my book Strategic Navigation and have come to awareness about the thinking process more from a need to develop strategy than because of any real familiarity with TOC and its tools.

I will say, however, that although I still teach courses in the TOC tools, over the past 5-6 years that's become a secondary part of my professional work. It took me about eight years (1993-2001) to realize that I didn't really subscribe to Goldratt's philosophy of "teaching to fish, rather than providing a fish." Yes, from a purely philosophical standpoint, it's much more noble to teach people to be self-sufficient. I know I personally like that better. I enjoy "seeing the lights come on," which is the one thing I found most gratifying about my graduate teaching for the University of Southern California.

But after eight years of frustration ("Why don't more people want to learn this great stuff? Why don't they use it more after they learn it?"), I've come to two conclusions about teaching fishing versus distributing fish. The first is that the large majority of people, especially those at more influential levels in the organization, don't want to learn how to fish for themselves. They're too busy to take the time for it---they just want the fish, and they want it now! If they want another fish at some later time, they'll call me back again. So, I've learned that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. Unless you hold his head under and...never mind---let's not go there. :-)

The second thing I've learned is that you can't make much money selling training. The biggest training-only company in the U.S. grosses only about $20 million per year, and they run open seminars in all major cities several times a year. It's training on a mass-production scale, ultimately it probably doesn't result in much real impact, and it's not all that productive Throughput-wise. So my training is just an adjunct to my consulting. I find as much gratification in going into an organization and leading them through the process of building their strategies or solving complex system problems. They see the tools in action, but they don't learn much about them, except by "osmosis." After they've seen the results, maybe one in ten says, "I'd like to learn how to do that..."

Those are two major lessons I've learned from conducting courses. The third is more general. With each course I teach, I'm exposed to different people in different industries or life-situations. There are subtle differences in the way the thinking process is applied in each case. As I watch my students construct their trees, I learn a lot about "the outside world." In addition, because people absorb learning in different ways and at different rates, I find myself forced to come up with new ways of expressing the same learning points. That's good for me personally, because it deepens my understanding of the thinking process and systems in general.

Q&A with Bill Dettmer - Q5 - What is the big deal about Boyd?

Q: You know, Bill, I've never really been all that attracted to the Boyd loop and yet a lot of TOC people are.  For some reason I find myself nodding off whenever I read about it (not in your Strategic Navigation book specifically, but in general). 

Can you take one last shot at convincing me why I should learn more?

Well, when you nod off, I certainly hope that you're getting some quality rest! I've often said that I thought my books could be a sure cure for insomnia, but now I have first-hand testimony confirming it!

Far be it from me to force any kind of thinking on anyone. If it doesn't intrigue you, then it probably wouldn't be worth your time and effort to study it. I can suggest one reason why that might be the case, however. From what little I've seen, most people come directly to the OODA loop (observe-orient-decide-act) without any foundation for how or why it was developed, or what it can (and has) done. So let me make just three points about Boyd and his OODA loop.

First, the OODA loop is like the tip of an iceberg. It's a potential entry point into something much larger in scope than TOC alone---systems thinking. It forces one to consider factors well beyond what one typically focuses one's attention on. This happens primarily in the "observe" and "orient" steps. The OODA loop is just an expression of a larger philosophy that Boyd propounded called maneuver warfare. Don't be deceived by the term "warfare." Though Boyd's application of his philosophy (and the OODA loop) was primarily military-oriented, it didn't take long for perceptive people to see the transferability to ANY competitive environment at all, for example business or even sports. (I recently wrote a white paper on the application of maneuver warfare to the sport of American football.) So, what intrigues me about Boyd and the OODA loop is that they represent a gateway to a meta-level consideration of systems, of which TOC is only a part. A really excellent book---relatively short, easy-to-read, and full of valuable information advice---is Certain to Win, by Chet Richards. Chet was one of Boyd's early colleagues and understands the Boyd philosophy as well as anyone out there. More importantly, he can express it in an eminently readable way.

Second, Boyd's personal history alone is fascinating. I first learned about him when a friend and respected colleague recommended the book Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, by Robert Coram. Owing to my former military career, it piqued my interest. The story of how Boyd evolved his philosophy through his life experiences was so engaging that I read the whole book in three sittings over two days. Perhaps the most fascinating part for me was that as he was evolving the philosophy, he was using it in an organizational setting---the Pentagon---to beat the defense bureaucracy at its own game! The part describing how then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney called Boyd in secretly in November 1990, after General Schwarzkopf had presented his battle plan for Operation Desert Storm, was a revelation to me. Apparently, Schwarzkopf had proposed a frontal assault on the Iraqi Army in Kuwait that anticipated 10,000 or more casualties. For Cheney, this was unacceptable. He called in Boyd, who essentially steered the battle planning toward maneuver-thinking, and the result was the famous "left hook" that bagged the entire Iraqi Army and half of the Republican Guard (with only 179 casualties). After reading Boyd's story and Richards' book, the relevance to TOC and the thinking process popped out at me so vividly that I could not ignore it. I was already 3/4 through the draft of Strategic Navigation at that point, and I went back a rewrote much of it to incorporate the Boyd philosophy.

Third, Boyd was a "prophet without honor in his own land." He was an Air Force officer---and independent thinker---reviled by most of his Air Force colleagues...but embraced with a passion by the U.S. Marine Corps! In one of the strangest turns of fate, at Boyd's funeral, when he was interred in Arlington National Cemetery, there were only two Air Force officers present---one a major from the Pentagon who had known of Boyd only by reputation, the other a 3-star general who was the "designated Air Force representative" at the funeral. There were dozens of Marines and Army officers there, and a Marine Major General delivered a eulogy for an Air Force colonel---unheard of! What's more, the Marines have erected a life-size bronze statue of John Boyd in the entryway of their "Marine University" at their Quantico, Virginia, base where all warfare doctrine is taught. A statue of an Air Force officer in a hallowed Marine hall---heaven forfend! There had to be something special about Boyd for that to happen---and in truth, there was.

So, rather than try to send you diving back into MY words on Boyd, let me suggest that you enter the building on the ground floor. Go directly to the source first---Coram's book. Then read Richards' book. And, Clarke, if you're half as sharp as I think you are, you'll see an immediate, resonating connection between Boyd's philosophy and TOC...and especially with the thinking process and the OODA loop.

Q&A with Bill Dettmer - Q6 - What is next book?

Q: What is your next book going to be about Bill?

Hmmm...why does anybody assume that there will be a "next book?" When I finished writing Strategic Navigation, I thought that I'd said all I had to say. Then three years later, my publisher persuaded me to write a "second edition" of Goldratt's Theory of Constraints, which turned out to be so different from the original version that it warranted a new title.

When that happened, I had been gradually collecting the research material for "the next book." I have a 3-cubic-foot book box nearly filled with research papers, books, and a rough outline. My intention is to write (eventually) a book on systems thinking and the systems approach to management. It will be far more than Senge's The Fifth Discipline, though it will incorporate some of that.

Most people don't realize that systems thinking/management predated Senge by a couple of decades, dating back to Churchman's and Checkland's writings about it in the 1960s, and E.S. Quade's work on systems analysis for the Rand Corporation. I got my masters degree in systems management from the University of Southern California through a program that had been conceived in 1964. I later taught for seven years in that same program. Even that program, though it aspired to be a "whole systems" wrap-around, had to make do with piecemeal, patchwork subjects-topics-tools all stitched together under the rubric of "systems management." There was no single text book that addressed the overall philosophy of managing systems, rather than just gluing together optimized processes.

So my magnum opus, which I would like to start on sometime next year, will be that wrap-around text book on systems thinking/management. I want to try to integrate such diverse thinkers as Kuhn, Diamond, Argyris, Kotter, Ackoff, Churchman, Checkland, Senge, Boyd, etc., and---yes---Goldratt. I want to try to create a kind of "unified field theory" on understanding systems. All that said, this is a big undertaking, and I may not get to it next year---or maybe not ever. Before I do anything else, Eli Schragenheim and I have to finish our sequel to Manufacturing at Warp Speed (tentatively titled Supply Chain Fulfillment at Warp Speed), which is due to our publisher in mid-2008.

Clarke: Great, I'll have plenty of new questions when both of these questions come out. 

Bill Dettmer's latest book - Giveaway!!!

Okay.  If you would like to win a free copy of Bill Dettmer's latest TOC book - which is very good, by the way - then leave a comment below which tells me something quite interesting you've discovered or experienced with TOC.  Don't forget to leave your email address (but probably not your postal address - I'll ask for that when I need it).

Let me clarify that: it's got to be about TOC and it's got to be quite interesting.  I don't care how many words you leave. It might be a story about how you discovered TOC.  It might be a little known fact (or even fiction) about Eli Goldratt.  It might be a success story, or a failure.  A quite interesting link is fine.  Just so long as it is about TOC and quite interesting.

My example would be that "I didn't know that TOC was pronounced T - O - C until about 5 years ago; before that I thought people pronounced it Toc, as in Tick."

I'll pick the winner just after Christmas and the folks at the American Society for Quality will post out the book to the lucky winner (who I'll pick with a little bit of randomness too).