TOC expert Alan Barnard has given me permission to publish his fantastic TOCICO presentation in which he shares some truly original and important TOC thinking.
Note: you've already seen the pdfs from the TOCICO conference - this file contains much more content and is much richer.
I'm hoping that Alan will be able to do a Q&A or podcast with me to discuss his new simplified process further.
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.
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 1st 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”.
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
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