It's Not Luck - Eliyahu M. Goldratt [37]
“Maybe,” Jim Doughty says.
“No, not maybe. Definitely. Have you ever been in a situation where you felt that you were in a swimming pool filled with ping-pong balls and your job was to hold all of them under water? The feeling that you are spending almost all your time fighting fires?”
“Have I?” he laughs. “That’s the story of my life, especially in the past five years.”
“You see, in such situations, the mere fact that you know how to fight the local fires clearly indicates that you have intuition. Nevertheless, you don’t have even the beginning of the thread to help untie the knot.”
“I agree,” says Brandon, “but in don’t have the beginning of the thread, how can I write the relevant cloud?”
“Oh, sorry. I gave you the wrong impression. The cloud is not always the first step. You are supposed to use the cloud only after the existing situation is well organized in your mind.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you are constantly fire-fighting, you have the impression that you are surrounded by many, many problems.”
“I am,” says Jim.
“The Thinking Processes claim that these problems are not independent of each other, but there are strong links of cause and effect between them.”
“Yeah, I believed so too, when I went to Sunday school. What life has taught me since then is that problems are linked by excuses.”
I ignore his joke. “Until these cause and effect connections are established, we don’t have a clear enough picture of the situation. The first step, then, is to use a very systematic way to build what is called a Current Reality Tree, diagramming the cause and effect relationships that connect all the problems prevailing in a situation. Once you do this, you realize that you don’t have to deal with many problems because at the core there are always only one or two causes.”
“What you are telling us is that underlying any given situation there are actually only one or two core problems?” Brandon finds it hard to believe.
“Precisely. Only one or two core problems that are the cause for all the others. That’s why I don’t call the symptoms problems, I call them undesirable effects. They are unavoidable derivatives of the core problem.”
“This is important,” Brandon says thoughtfully. “If what you say is possible, which I doubt, then we have the key to direct our efforts toward the core reason, not to the symptoms.”
“You got it!” I smile. “And the Thinking Processes give us a step-by-step recipe of how to do it. You start with a list of undesirable effects, between five and ten of them. Then you follow the recipe, and you end up with a clear identification of the core problems. Moreover, it intensifies your intuition, which is vital for the next step, which is directing your attention to finding a solution to the core problem.”
“It sounds much too simple,” Jim says.
Why do I do it to myself? I repeat Jonah’s claims as if they are mine, but if I truly believed in them I would use his methods more frequently. For example, since the last board meeting I have had the feeling that I’m floundering, that I’m clutching at straws, and God knows how much I need a solid solution. But the truth is that I don’t believe enough in Jonah’s theory to give it a try now.
“Have you ever tried it yourself?” Brandon asks me. “I mean in situations that looked hopeless?”
I think about it for a while. As a plant manager I didn’t use Jonah’s methods. I used his conclusions. No wonder, at that time I was not aware of the Thinking Processes, the hard core of Jonah’s Theory Of Constraints. When I became a divisional manager, Jonah insisted that I learn his methods so I’d stop being dependent on him, and be able to help myself. Since then I’ve used sections of them a lot, mostly to empower my people, to solve conflicts and to build team spirit. But in at least three situations I used the Thinking Processes in full.
“Yes, I did,” I must admit,