Q5: Earlier you wrote: "At the time they were forming the Goldratt Network and I was invited to join them. Rather that learning about the existing tools that they had I became part of the team that develop and translated the Thinking Processes. What an experience that was but perhaps you should ask your next question." So I have to ask ... can you tell us about that experience.
A5: Perhaps this should be the subject matter of my book (if I ever write one). I started by working with Oded on the idea of the TOC club. Eli had this idea of bringing the Theory of Constraints to individuals. He had written a number of Late Night discussions and the idea was to get people to read these and to use them to practice producing trees and clouds. Of course it was a promotional tool but for me they provided subject matters to analyse. In parallel with this we were working with Oded to learn how to produce Negative and Positive trees: or Positive trees with negative leaves. My biggest exposure to the Thinking Process came near the end of 1991 when Eli brought his entourage of young women tutors from New Haven CT., to the UK Jonah upgrade workshop. What an emotional experience that turned out to be.
I’m not sure what happened but perhaps with hindsight I can now explain it. I was asked to video the proceeding – I had a good VHS video camera which I had used to video Eli’s workshops but whilst using it at this workshop I began to feel “out on a limb” I was there but looking at the proceeding through the lens of a camera. I wasn’t with my colleagues and so felt a bit isolated.
Then we went into breakout sessions to learn how trees were constructed – I remember well our assigned tutor, Christy, she was in her twenties blond and beautiful. We all fell in love with her at first sight as she stood in front of us showing us how to proceed. We observed as different members of the group construct their trees. It was a truly international event and I recall one of the Israelis presenting a tree on the subject of having to cope with the influx of a million people into the State of Israel. His department had the task of building the infrastructure to deal with all those people – I think from Europe after the Berlin wall had come down.
After the teaching session we were asked to go away and produce our own trees. It wasn’t until several years later that I learned that I build trees in my head and then dump them to paper. I wish someone had spotted that fact at the conference. I recall sitting at a table away from the madding crowd lost in thought. I hadn’t a clue where my thoughts were as nothing appeared on that paper in front of me. But I must have been analysing my own current reality. You have to remember that in that year I had gone from being employed as a successful manager of a team of really bright people working with the engineering industry – with ready access to many open doors and welcoming clients. Then in May that year I was made redundant, with a small pension to support my family and a desire to follow a career in TOC. I was working with an organisation as an Associate, that didn’t employ me and were asking me to pay them to learn how to work with them. At that time I hadn’t a clue how my finances would work out and the investment in time and effort seemed huge. Needless to say that took me into what Oded called a “dip” – a depression that lasted about six months before I began to come out of it. I remember someone coming to me and saying “You look lost Jim”, I replied “I am, I want my mum.” If truth be known what I really needed at that time was a PRT of my own: A clear plan of the obstacles and intermediate objectives of how to get there. The irony was that the PRT didn’t appear on our journey until several months later. When we finally got to developing that art of the TOC Roadmap I can remember thinking, “My god why didn’t I have this tool twenty years ago.”
At this point I could talk about my experiences with the TOC club or with working with Oded and his dedicated team of people. But both of them could be long stories so I will end now – my computer has frozen on me twice whilst writing this.
