Theory of Constraints And More

A Guide to Implementing the Theory of Constraints (TOC)
PowerPoints	Preface	Introduction	Site Map	Contents	Next Step

Deming
& Johnson

Taylor & Social Darwinism

Toyota, Kaizen, & Lean

Paradox of Systemism

Yes, There Is More

This page is a place holder for a number of things that I want to address, in fact, need to address.

The bulk of this website was written over the period 2003-2004. The drum-buffer-rope pages; especially make-to-stock, received a bit of an overhaul in April/May 2005. The replenishment page got an overhaul in June 2006. The evaluating change page was written near the end of 2005, to replace one called accounting for change, and it didn’t really get the complexity wrung out of it until December 2007.

At the end of 2004 I knew that we had been down this path, the path of industrial systemism, several times before in the last 100 years. Goldratt’s journey is just the latest and maybe the most significant. It was apparent that Deming had “been there done that” – well almost – and that nobody had listened. Actually that is not entirely true; some people did listen. Henry Neave listened, H. Thomas Johnson listened, and Donald Wheeler the student of Deming who was the student of Shewhart listened and carries the knowledge forward. However, I was amazed at the mis-information, or rather, mis-interpretation that surrounds Deming. Maybe it isn’t even mis-interpretation, but mis-appropriation of his name in support of something that other people wanted to believe that he stood for.

If I was amazed at what Deming had done and had been misinterpreted for, I was absolutely dumbfounded at Taylor. Almost everything that I read about Taylor, and believed, is wrong. How do I know that? I went and read what Taylor said himself and it bore no relationship what-so-ever with what other people said that he had said, or said that he stood for.

How is it that these two gentlemen, so incredibly important as they are, have been so strongly mis-interpreted? How is it that one set of actions can be interpreted as the direct opposite and then so readily bought into by others? Why do we so readily want to believe and re-believe these wrong stories? What comfort does it bring to us?

Not unrelated to this is the interpretation of Japanese approaches to industrialization and their transmission back across the Pacific Ocean to America, often severely distorted in the process. It is the same issue. From the West to the East the message is clear and undistorted, but on the return trip from East to West most of the message is lost. We are repeating with Lean the same errors that we have experienced twice before. The content may be there in part, but the context has been stripped clean.

If we don’t learn from this, we will just continue to make the same basic error, time and time again, that is for certain.

I was also interested in organizations as communities, and had bought into the idea that hierarchy and bigness were bad in some way, but it was not clear to me how. That idea didn’t survive as I will explain in a minute.

In early 2006 I began to play with an idea that a fundamental lack of exposure of individuals to “industrial experience” underlies the paradox of why common sense in this environment so often isn’t. I think common sense should be common, but if we are deprived of the common experience, or some other prior experience blocks us from future learning, then common sense isn’t necessarily common at all.

I shared my draft of that idea with the late John Caspari and I am especially grateful for the one line e-mail that came back, it gave me considerable confidence that I was on the right track. That material is basically available at the moment as a PowerPoint, stripped to the bare bones and called Values, Beliefs, and Industrialization.

More recently a number of important things fell into place. Bill Dettmer sent to me an audio disk of Jerry Harvey talking about the Abilene Paradox and negative fantasies. Ah, how often had I heard negative fantasies and had not known what they were, or how to handle them, or indeed what gave rise to them. Harvey’s work lead me to Elliott Jaques and all I can say is thank goodness the psychologists understand (because apparently nobody else does). Elliot Jaques shows how hierarchy should be enabling, and offers a view on human capability, and maturation of that capability, which is the antithesis of most of the pulp that masquerades as management literature (and I mean the material coming out of our best universities).

Finally, my personal fascination with tacit knowing and abduction in logic, as a process of learning, dragged me back to several books written by Gregory Bateson, and another one written on Bateson by someone else. Bateson’s emphasis on errors of logical type explains to me why we observe what we observe of the interpretation of Deming, Taylor, and currently of Lean and Theory of Constraints. It also has independent and powerful congruence with the work of Elliott Jaques.

I’ve tried, once again, briefly, to capture the germ of the ideas of Harvey, Jaques, and Bateson in a Power Point; Logical Types, Clouds, and Fantasies. The text will have to wait, and maybe graphics are far more effective in any case.

Although I can hardly spell “epistemology,” I have been able to stop several conversations dead by pronouncing it! Until we are willing to learn how we know what we know, we are “bound” to continue repeating the errors of the past that we have observed in applying systemic approaches to industrialization.

As I said at the start of this page, there are a number of things that I want to address, in fact, need to address; it requires time to access the information and winnow the wheat from the chaff. There is no shortage of chaff. But at least I hope that I have given you some indication of the direction that I believe that we need to take. If nothing else, at least there are a couple of Power Point presentations available in the meantime.

Postscript

I put some time aside in March/April 2008 to pummel the pages in this section into shape; they have sat around in varying degrees of incoherence since 2005. Instead, however, I overcame a blockage regarding the Theory of Constraint’s approach to project management, Critical Chain, and consumed that carefully allotted time with writing new pages about project operations rather than rescuing these old pages on broader and more fundamental issues.

At the same time a need arose to introduce healthcare and to differentiate between Theory of Constraints and Lean. If we don’t understand this difference now, then we, in the West, are going to go down the same path of “current fad = eventual failure.” That people are open to such fads is powerful evidence that we all want to improve, and I care a great deal that failure to improve will be read as fact that we can’t improve, rather than a failure to truly understand the underlying and fundamental problem.

Writing about projects gave me some insight into how much multiple parallel dependencies in healthcare are the cause of so much of the chaos and falling productivity there. A significant issue is that without an underlying logistical approach – without bringing time into the focusing process – we will not know the difference between the important and the urgent in healthcare. The Toyota Production System, upon which Lean is loosely modelled has an underlying logistical process embedded within it. Lean unfortunately has been ported to healthcare without this. Not knowing where to focus, and why, therefore becomes totally non-systemic. “Totally non-systemic” is a nice way of saying “reactionary.”

Having to write something to differentiate Lean and Theory of Constraints has been, in retrospect, a useful exercise because it helped me to frame how to deal with the jumble of Toyota, Kaizen, and Lean. New English translations of the early work of Shingo and Ohno are also now available and that should help even further.

I am reminded, more and more, that the fundamentals – well almost all of the fundamentals – that we must address were identified and effectively dealt with between the 1880’s and the 1920’s. That is they arose with industrialization and were overcome. The only aspect which had to wait until the 1970’s was the formalized concept of a weakest link. If we return to the original work of Taylor, Deming, Ohno, Shigeo, and Goldratt, we will be so much better off. To do so begs that we accept responsibility ourselves rather than to transfer it to someone else.