Theory of Constraints Handbook - James Cox Iii [85]
Second, the inevitability of changes in the business world implies that there is a finite window for any implementation to take hold. If you cannot set up the appropriate processes before the next earthquake, your initiative will eventually be in trouble.
The Cycle of Results (CORE)
The implementation feedback system used by ProChain to address the Uptake Problem is called the Cycle of Results TM (Newbold 2008, Chapter 15; also referred to as CORE). It addresses the first five root causes of failure from the previous section to create a process that builds trust. I define trust as willingness to depend on someone or something, in a specific context. The people implementing the solution must be willing to depend on that solution, continuously, into the future. People must believe that the perceived rewards will continue to outweigh the perceived costs.
FIGURE 5-4 The Cycle of Results. (Copyright © 2008 by ProChain Solutions, Inc. Reprinted with permission.)
Basic Principles
Figure 5-4 shows CORE pictorially. In this picture, the conditions or states achieved are in the boxes and the actions leading to those states are on the arrows. The boxes are stacked because the meaning of the states may be different for different people. Different people may feel different types or levels of urgency, have different perceptions of value, and so on.
The cycle starts with the actions leading into Urgency: learn and analyze. It is especially important to learn and analyze the urgency that people experience to change. Suppose you are a consultant and someone asks you to help him or her implement Critical Chain for a project. Do you immediately convene the project team, or do you first try to understand why the organization wants to implement it? As discussed later with implementation planning, we may need to take many actions in order to understand what urgency people feel today and what urgency we need them to feel.
Because of its importance, Urgency is in the center. It is a necessary condition for meaningful change. Urgency may be different for each person, so for example a senior leader may experience urgency to improve revenues, a project manager may experience urgency to deliver a project more quickly, and a worker may experience urgency to finish a specific task. You will need to understand the urgency for different individuals, because they will not respond to urgency they do not feel. Very often, I have heard people say that they believed their Critical Chain implementation had urgency “because my boss says so.” If it is their boss’s urgency, it is not theirs. If it is not theirs, they do not really feel it. If I see on television that a building is on fire, I will feel badly for the people inside, but I probably won’t run out my door to escape the flames.
How do we combine these different feelings of urgency into a whole that is synchronized around the needed improvement initiative? We need to describe a vision for the implementation, a vision that connects what the company does (and why people want to work there) with the benefits they should expect from the implementation. For example, a simple vision for WI might be, “We will improve our customers’ lives and our ability to compete for their business by getting them the new widget technologies they need when they need it.”
This vision should be described to the different people in the organization in their terms, in order both to set Expectations for the implementation and to tie the expectations to people’s individual sense of urgency. For a Critical Chain implementation, senior leadership will need to understand the strategic and bottom-line implications. Project managers will need to understand that they will be able to focus on high-impact actions.