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.
