Theory of Constraints Handbook - James Cox Iii [441]
Unstructured Approaches—Management on the Hoof
Management books paint a gloomy picture of the problem-solving and decision-making abilities of managers and organizational decision makers (Simon et al., 1987), highlighting the decision traps faced by managers (Russo and Schoemaker, 1989) and the common failings of managers (Nutt, 2002). These include, for example, weaknesses in the appreciation, analysis, assessment, and action phases of problem intervention—a failure to appropriately frame decision problems or problem situations; a failure in direction setting—that is, to determine inclusive, acceptable strategic goals and values; a tendency to jump in and act precipitously; a failure to understand or accommodate stakeholder influences and needs; a tendency toward overconfidence and to overestimate one’s predictive ability, sphere of influence, or influence on past successes and future outcomes; a failure to learn from prior actions; a failure to recognize or address ethical dilemmas or the importance of ethical values, etc. (Russo and Schoemaker, 1989; Senge, 1990; Bazerman, 1996; Nutt, 2002). Some consequences are what many perceive to be the predominance of a firefighting mentality, and the preponderant use of managerial fads and fashions, such as quality circles, JIT, BPR, Six Sigma, etc.—with managers having the expectation that the use of these tools or processes, even in isolation, will help address their wider problems and deliver riches, now and in the future.
TABLE 23-3 Framework for Mapping Methodologies
However, if and when “managing becomes a constant juggling act of deciding where to allocate overworked people and which incipient crisis to ignore for the moment” (Bohn, 2000, 83), it is usually deemed to be more expedient to attend to the squeaky wheel, to search for local solutions, as the big picture drifts out of sight. Managers then face the issues of tackling problems as they resurface or have adverse impact elsewhere. They may have framed their problems inappropriately, tackled the wrong problems, attacked problems at the wrong levels, or just addressed them in poor fashion.
Problems poorly addressed create more problems and take longer to fix in the long-term. Senge (1990) describes this common behavior in his Fixes that Fail and Shifting the Burden archetypes. In Fixes that Fail, an inappropriate fix might work in the short term but make the problem worse in the long term; for example, smoking may bring short-term relief but leads to long-term addiction and health problems. In the Shifting the Burden archetype, the quick fix not only makes the problem worse in the long term, but also undermines the effectiveness of any other alternative fix that could be used. For example, employing consultants may assist in the short term, but may consume resources required to develop expertise in-house.
In all of these situations, several features usually stand out. They include the lack of an overall perspective, the systems or holistic view; and a related inability to think about the wider stakeholder community, their values and views, about the wider systemic consequences over time, that is, within and without the system. More specifically, they include the related inability to think about the time-related dynamic nature of cause-effect relations and feedback. They include behavior of seeming irrationality and behavior suggesting lack of awareness of the values and perspectives of others. In essence, these are features suggesting that some formal processes may be needed—in particular, processes adopting a systems perspective. We provide a brief overview of such processes or approaches in the following subsections.
Formal or Structured Approaches
There are many structured approaches, and we have chosen to review a few of the approaches that have been compared with TOC. In the next section,