Theory of Constraints Handbook - James Cox Iii [317]
To reach true consensus on “What to Change?”
1. Each individual contributes the biggest undesirable effects (UDEs) that exist in his or her area of responsibility with respect to achieving the organization’s goal (or closing the gap).
2. Each individual presents his or her conflict cloud that blocks them from removing their UDEs.
3. The group reaches the generic or core conflict cloud (the deepest conflict blocking growth and stability for the organization as a whole of which all the other UDE conflicts are just examples of) for their organization.
To reach true consensus on “to What to Change?”
4. The group exposes the erroneous assumptions underlying the generic conflict cloud.
5. The group identifies the direction of the solution that could break the generic conflict cloud.
6. Each individual applies the direction of the solution to his or her UDE conflict cloud to generate specific injections (to remove their specific UDEs and to prevent possible negatives on any stakeholder related to the new solution).
7. The group adds the missing injections to the main direction.
To reach true consensus on “How to Cause the Change?”
8. Each individual contributes obstacles that might block the implementation of the injections.
9. Each individual turns his or her obstacles into intermediate objectives.
10. The group builds the roadmap showing the dependencies between all the injections and intermediate objectives.
11. The group translates the roadmap into an implementation plan with each action assigned to a specific manager, together with estimated duration, etc., from which a Critical Chain plan can be built.
A significant number of organizations followed Goldratt’s advice and started their journey to implement the TOC holistic approach with the 4 × 4 process. The 4 × 4 process seemed to work where other approaches failed because it helped overcome some obstacles that other approaches could not (Kendall, 2001). However, reports from TOC champions and supporting TOC experts made it clear that there were still many obstacles blocking organizations from implementing the necessary and sufficient changes to put their organizations on what Goldratt called “the red and green curve” of exponential growth (red curve) and improved stability (green curve).
One of the major remaining obstacles was how to get the owners/executives of the company to become the internal champions for the TOC implementation – a necessary condition for both a holistic and sustainable implementation of TOC.
The Viable Vision Initiative
In November 2002, Goldratt wrote in a letter, “When I do an analysis of a company I am somewhat satisfied only when I clearly see how it is possible to bring the company to have, in less than four years, net profit equal to its current total sales.” In 2003, Goldratt, rather than keeping the vision to himself, shared it with company owners, executives and senior managers around the globe, not just the vision, but also the reasons why he believed this incredible vision was viable for most organizations. Many company owners and executives responded positively to Goldratt’s invitation to partner with the Goldratt Group and other TOC providers to validate if such an incredible vision was possible for their organizations.
This provided an excellent research opportunity to develop further the process to help organizations develop a business strategy that is based on building, capitalizing, and sustaining a decisive competitive edge by satisfying customers’ important needs to the extent that no significant competitor can and also for learning how to really turn company owners and executives into the internal champions to personally drive the execution of the business strategy.
Since 2003, many lessons have been learned, not only how to increase the probability of achieving and sustaining the desired growth and stability for organizations, but also what changes in the process and solution design should be made when applied to different