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By Root 3151 0

of this resistance can be classified into errors of omission (not doing what should be done), errors of commission (doing what should not be done or doing the right thing not in the right way), and errors of detection and correction (not detecting or correcting or taking too long to detect or correct despite available data). To prevent these “errors,” organizations need to adopt a holistic focusing mechanism to identify when to make changes (and when not) what changes to make (and what not) using TOC’s 5FS and TOC’s TP, and how to implement these changes in a sustainable way. Organizations also need a decision-support mechanism to judge the impact of decisions on the system as a whole (e.g., TOC’s TA) as well as a fast feedback mechanism to reduce the time to detect and time to correct for mistakes made (e.g., TOC’s BM). Last, organizations that want to achieve CI have to create a culture that will ensure that fear of failure does not become a major cause of errors of omission and errors of detection and correction.

Henry Ford and Taiichi Ohno provided great examples of how to create such a holistic CI mechanism and the necessary culture (based on the scientific method) to inspire CI at all levels and within all functions but which focused on supporting the overall vision. They both shared a belief that anything can be improved and made sure this belief, together with their vision of where CI would be most valuable to the organization (and other stakeholders), was continuously communicated and practiced throughout the organization. They also knew the importance of creating a safe environment (to reduce errors of omission caused by fear of failure) to encourage continuous experiments to find better, simpler, faster ways of doing things with less waste, and lastly, used continuous “audits” to ensure compliance with the latest best-practices (until these can be improved) and alignment between organizational policies and their vision (to prevent policy conflicts). This is in full alignment with the direction of the solution proposed by TOC today, but TOC has gone one step further to provide a simple yet powerful focusing mechanism to enable management to differentiate between the many things that can be improved and the few that must be improved now as well as a simple conflict resolution process for breaking any conflicts that block CI for the organization as a whole.

TOC’s underlying mindsets, its 5FS and TP together with the specific POOGI mechanisms defined for each of the TOC application solutions using two buffer monitoring mechanisms to focus CI efforts. The simplest tracks are where WIP is building up to identify where flow is being delayed (the constraint or CCR). The second use of buffers employs Pareto analysis to identify the major causes of red and black buffer status (buffer diagnostics), which provides an excellent focusing mechanism for the powerful time, waste, and variation reduction techniques of Lean and Six Sigma. Such a focusing mechanism should help to ensure that management can really focus properly, doing what should be done and, more importantly, not doing what should not be done (which should save significant time, energy, and money). This approach should ensure that the organization achieves both growth and stability (from focusing scarce resources on CI of only the few parts or processes that must be improved to increase the flow of goal units).

In order for top management and other stakeholders to contribute actively and get engaged in change initiatives, they need to understand why the change is needed by visualizing the gap between the current state and the desired future state on the system constraint and identifying the consequences (on the system as a whole) of closing or not closing this gap. Only once that is thoroughly understood are stakeholders in a position to fully explore what to change (what to stop doing to address current UDEs) and to what to change (what to start doing without the risk of new UDEs), and how to cause the change using TOC’s TP, and (when needed) other root cause