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Tools for Daily Decision Making and Problem Solving

While we are free to choose our actions, we are not free to choose the consequences of those actions. Consequences are governed by natural law.

—Stephen Covey

Everything we do, every action we take, places a cause into reality and the effects (results) of the cause (our action) inevitably happen. The results (effects) of our actions do not have a choice, but the actions we take (the causes we put into motion) are a result of the choices we make. An action is putting in motion a conscious or not-so-conscious decision. Whether we are consciously or not-so-consciously doing so, we are making many decisions every day, day in and day out. Many of the decisions we make not only impact us personally, but also have an effect on others—our partners, families, teammates, associates, clients, suppliers, shareholders, communities, etc. Of course, the decisions made by others quite often have an effect on us.

Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do.

—Jose Ortega

Negative Branch Reservation (NBR)

We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality.

—Ayn Rand

Think about how often well-intentioned actions have led to undesirable consequences. The Negative Branch Reservation (NBR) is the standard TOC TP tool with which we use cause-and-effect thinking to predict, as best we can, the effects of a given cause (e.g., action), and modify our idea before taking action in order to prevent undesirable consequences of taking the action. Situations in which the NBR is most commonly used are:

Someone has presented you with an idea that they think is great, but from your vantage point, you see potential problems stemming from it. (You are thinking, “Yes, but . . .”)

You are presenting (or preparing to present) someone with an idea you think is great, but from their vantage point, they see (or might see) potential problems stemming from it. (They are thinking, “Yes, but . . .”)

You have an idea, and your intuition is telling you that your idea is still incomplete. (You are thinking, “Yes, but . . .”)

The NBR maps the cause-and-effect relationships between an idea (the cause) and the undesirable effects (UDEs) that are predicted to stem from that idea (cause). It is then used to modify (typically by expanding on) the idea in ways that would prevent the UDEs from becoming reality.

With the NBR, we introduce the entity type injection. An injection is an entity that describes an element of an idea (solution) that is intended to be implemented. Injections are always entry points to a tree such as the cause-effect trees just discussed. They represent elements of the system that do not yet exist in the system, but that will be consciously injected into the system in order to cause the changes desired.

Figure 25-8 illustrates a simple NBR. Note that the only entry points to the tree (entities that are causes only) are either elements of the system that exist today (and therefore can be checked to exist in the system today) or injections (elements of the system that do not exist today but are intended to be injected into it in order to cause the change). Every entity that is an effect (entities that have at least one arrow pointing into them, whether they are also causes and have arrows pointing from them) is stemming from an injection, and thus does not exist in the current environment. Therefore, these entities are predicted to become part of the future state of the system.

I want to stress the importance of considering the reason that you or others have generated the idea in the first place—the benefits that the idea, once implemented, are intended to produce. Acknowledging these benefits will provide you with the stamina to work through the negative branches of your own ideas to achieve the benefits. And, to communicate your reservations about other’s ideas in a way that they will understand you are not trying to throw out their entire idea and its benefits, you just want to trim the potential negative ramifications.