Theory of Constraints Handbook - James Cox Iii [546]
5. Time Allocation. Of the entire 18 hours allocated for the workshop, approximately one-third or six hours of the content went into the buy-in process. The remainder of the time went toward teaching three selected TOC TP tools—the Evaporating Cloud (EC), Logic Branch, and Prerequisite Tree. From a planning perspective, it was agreed from the onset that the number of tools taught would be sacrificed for more buy-in time if, as, and when necessary. We strongly felt it was more important that the audience, many from a low educational background, left with strong foundational skills rather than a sketchy recollection of three tool processes. Fortunately, this compromise never took place. Conversely, the more time that we spent on buy-in, the faster the teaching of the tools went. For most participants, this first 6 hours proved to be the most invaluable part of the course.
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Why is it so hard to answer the question why? Ironically, as many TOC for Education Inc. practitioners will agree, it is much easier to teach the same TOC tool to a child than to an adult. The purity of the answer to the question “why” seems to diminish in proportion to age. Likewise, it is the same when training a group of lower level employees versus senior managers. Why should that be? After much deliberation on this topic, I can only concur that our minds become so overloaded with information that it becomes harder and harder to extract the core essence of our thoughts, which TOC tools help us do so perfectly. Unlike children, our words are so intertwined with political correctness and societal expectations that eventually over time the true meaning is no longer communicated.
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Course Materials
From a course developer and trainer’s perspective, the end goal was to ensure that the learning was sustainable. In the absence of any immediate tangible benefits to the user, the problem was not so much in teaching TOC processes given the high logic component in Singapore education, but how to ensure continued behavioral application under stressful situations when the need for TOC is the greatest yet automatic default behavior takes over in the flight for safety and security.
Over the years, a common observation from local TOC courses conducted in a variety of corporate, school, and social services settings by experienced TOC trainers was the relatively low adoption rate after the course. While a certain percentage of buy-out is expected after training, it was surprising that a high number of those participants who seemed clearly bought in during the course rarely applied TOC afterward. Despite glowing feedback reviews and excellent process skills, few participants seemed to apply the tools on a regular basis after the course.
After contacting a number of past course participants, many admitted they enjoyed the course but felt that the TOC processes were too tedious to repeat. The compulsory use of TOC terminology to derive the logic such as “in order to . . . I must . . . because. . . .” and “if . . . then . . . because” and its rigorous process steps were considered too time consuming for regular use. While most felt the concepts and processes were relatively easy to grasp, they were not prepared to invest time and effort to practice and use TOC for daily issues that they believed could be solved intuitively without the need for any special thinking tool.
For others, they found it difficult to find appropriate daily opportunities to practice the tools. Not every decision they faced required a logic branch nor represented a fullblown conflict and not every conflict required a resolution. While some may argue in TOC circles that everyone has conflicts, it also depends on the