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By Root 2557 0

intuitive understanding of a cause-and-effect relationship—you know that if the lamp is not plugged in, the light will not turn on.1 You find that the lamp is not plugged in. Aha! You confidently plug the cord into the wall, flick the switch on again, and—oh no, the light is still not on. What do you check next? Your brain goes through a quick checklist of potential causes for the light not turning on. Do you change the light bulbs? Do you turn on another light in your home to verify that the problem is isolated to the lamp and not a larger issue such as the circuit breaker or fuse, or even an electricity outage in the neighborhood? Any of these would be sufficient to cause the lamp to not turn on, so you keep checking—in the order that your intuition, which is based on experience with similar situations, tells you is most likely to least likely—until you uncover the cause, make the appropriate change, and turn on the light.

FIGURE 25-1 Cause-and-effect map—lamp does not turn on.

Figure 25-1 graphically illustrates the cause-and-effect map you built in your mind. Please note that as you gained more information, your cause-and-effect mental map enlarged and you better understood the situation. You checked directly the facts you could check directly, and you modified the “entities”—your verbalization of the facts—as you went along. In the third scenario, when you finally looked outside at the rest of your street and found that it, too, was as dark as your lamp, you predicted and verified an effect that gave credence to a potential cause. If the street lights and neighbors’ lights were on, you would continue checking for alternative causes.

You also may not have been satisfied that you had at last verified the cause—you may have decided to speak with a neighbor or call the utility company. If they did in fact verify the power outage, the resulting cause-and-effect map would have looked like Fig. 25-2.

FIGURE 25-2 Cause-and-effect—power outage in the neighborhood.

In this example, you instinctively conducted checks on the hypotheses of cause-and-effect you were making, and you used a process to do so.

1. You identified a problem. The light doesn’t work.

2. You hypothesized a cause. The switch is not turned on.

3. You checked your hypothesis by checking for two conditions:

a. You verified the condition. You checked to see if “switch is not turned on” was actually the case. It was, in fact, turned on, so you hypothesized a different cause, and then verified that the condition existed.

b. You validated the cause-and-effect connection. Was the fact that the lamp was not plugged in really the cause for the lamp not turning on? You checked directly by plugging in the lamp and it still did not turn on! So, back to hypothesizing a condition that could cause the lamp to be out and then validating the cause-and-effect connection.

When you adapt the mentality of the scientist, you will do these checks automatically. As we make our way through the chapter, we will expand our understanding of these a template for the detailed process of checking is provided.2 It is also provided in Appendix B, which is located at the end of the chapter for your convenience.

While the example I used may seem trivial, the scientific process is not. Most of us simply are not practiced in using or communicating cause-and-effect logic. Dr. Goldratt recently conducted an experiment. He asked about 40 people—all were intelligent, educated adults ranging in age from 20-something to 60-something, ranging in professions from student to CEO—to think of and then write a sentence that contained the word “because.” The only qualifier for the sentence was that it needed to be a sentence that the individual writing it believed. In other words, they were each asked to make a statement of cause and effect that they believed to be correct. There were a wide variety of sentences, such as “I discipline my children because I care about their well being” to “Americans drive SUVs because they don’t care about the environment” to “My boss and I don