Theory of Constraints Handbook - James Cox Iii [339]
TOC provided a central concept around which a strong Throughput-driven corporate culture could be built.
TOC had strong buy-in and long-term support from both the CEO and the President.
Extensive exposure to the concepts and contrast of Cost World and Throughput World—this is a strong “tribal” motivator10
Use of the tools in all possible areas helped define and build processes and systems around the concepts.
Over time, success helped to build confidence in management’s capability, which drove an increasing virtuous loop.
Small, successful initial applications built trust and confidence.
Critical mass and bench strength in the TOC implementation team perpetuates the Throughput culture.
Recommendations and Summary
The aim of this chapter was to share important insights and experiences gained from both an internal and external TOC expert’s perspective as well as a generic process for implementing and sustaining TOC in a holistic way within both the private and public sectors.
With every implementation of TOC, whether done in one part of an organization (locally) or holistically (synchronized implementation in all the parts), we have the opportunity to learn both what worked and what did not work. One has to be careful to learn from each experience, but even more careful that one learns the right lessons.
Recommended Good Practices for Implementing TOC Holistically
The recommendations that follow are lessons learned that we consider key success factors or simply generic good practices for top management, internal and external TOC experts and TOC champions derived from experience with what did and did not work in practice.
Use the TOC 5FS, TP Roadmap, and S&T Tree
The best11 place to start with a holistic implementation of TOC is to gain top management understanding and long-term support. This is best achieved by education in the principles and application of the generic TOC concepts or “gestalt.” Without a deep and visceral understanding and acceptance of the value of a Throughput-driven win-win-win culture, all else is short-lived. Once achieved, the next step would be to gain consensus on how to do just that by getting all senior management (and other key stakeholders) to contribute to constructing a business/organization strategy using TOC’s 5FS (applied to the organization as a whole) and the TP Roadmap to better leverage system constraints.
The S&T tree format can then be used to develop the full analysis (the what, how, and why related to each proposed change as well as the level and sequence of implementation). Experience has shown that the S&T tree is an excellent communication tool to validate with and get consensus from stakeholders on the necessary and sufficient changes, contributions, and implementation sequence.
In cases where a generic S&T tree exists that closely fits the organization, the focus should be on validating the core assumptions and making the necessary modifications to match the specific situation at that organization. In either case, the S&T tree can also be used to plan, execute, and monitor the execution.
Changing Behaviors/Paradigms with Stories and Games
Changing behaviors requires a change in basic assumptions or paradigms through which we view the world. We recommend the following approaches for stakeholders to challenge and change their assumptions and decision-making framework.
Using the five (traditional) limiting versus five (TOC) enabling paradigms (Table 16-1) to show that it is the way we deal with constraints, complexity, conflicts, uncertainty, and bad behaviors/choices (rather than these challenges) that will determine our success (or failure).
Using the Throughput versus Cost World analogy to provide a simple, yet powerful explanation of the change in focus. Instead of incrementally improving the system by reducing costs everywhere, focusing on increasing Throughput (flow) through identifying and removing