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A Guide to Implementing the Theory of
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Introduction I started this
page in 2013, 10 years after the start of the original website. It is more personal, it is chronological,
and it contains new things; people are doing this all around the world. There is superb work going on in Critical
Chain for instance, there is superb work going on in Drum-Buffer-Rope. This work is dispersed amongst the
world-class practitioners that we have, and these people are accessible. The TOCICO conferences and the reference
bank of videos and presentations are the principle repository of these
materials. The materials are there,
please go and search for them. Better still, go to the
conferences and meet these people face to face. TOCICO is truly international; there are a
substantial number of members from South America, Eastern Europe, Japan,
India, and even those of us in the scattered isles of the south-west Pacific. In my own case
my developmental efforts seem to have gravitated towards the Thinking
Processes and the Cloud in particular.
This was not by design, it was by necessity, and let me be very clear
that this is not an “ends” in itself, but rather it is a “means” to an
end. That end is a successful
enterprise both now and in the future, be that; factory, hospital, software
or service or something greater. Well, I am
glad that you asked. When I first put
this page together I grouped things into a sort of logical progression. But how I come to these things is not
logical, it is chronological. So I
have decided now to regroup these things into a chronological progression,
and to flesh out the context a little bit more. It is more of a context of discovery rather
than a context of justification. Most
of this material leads to a PowerPoint, or to a new webpage. Some of this will lead you nowhere at this
moment because it is simply a statement of work that has been completed but
hasn’t yet seen the light of day. I’ve moved
many of the PowerPoints links, both of presented and of un-presented work, to
the homepage but I will still explain the context in the appropriate order on
this current page. I wanted to make
this work more accessible, and putting it on the homepage is about as
accessible as I can make it. In New Zealand
vernacular we have a saying “heaps of” as in “heaps of stuff,” and well there
is still a heap of stuff that remains and that I want to, at the very least,
“book-mark” so that it is known to exist.
So let’s just do exactly that. Bill Dettmer
mentioned to me around mid-2005 that I ought to read Jerry Harvey’s Abilene
Paradox and I did not do so. Not one
to give up, towards the end of 2006 he sent me the audio version of it, and,
well, I was hooked and I bought the book as well. Harvey exposes one “type” of negative
fantasy and the rationale behind it in his book and briefly mentions another
type of fantasy in the audio. I have
more fully integrated this second one since.
If you never do anything else, do get a copy of The Abilene Paradox
and read the eponymous chapter, and also for good measure read “The Gunsmoke
Phenomenon” and “Eichmann in the Organization” from the same book. There is
emotion generated by our logic – often a very powerful
and opposing emotion – and there is also rationality and logic to that
emotion if only we would care to understand it. New ideas; transformational or transcendent
ideas, generate negative fantasy and we must be aware of this if we are not
to lock up the systemic cloud in a conflicted state. I started to use this concept explicitly in
a device that I call a shadow cloud and by early 2009 this formed one of
three fundamental clouds that I use in explaining Theory of Constraints. In mid-2011,
once I knew how to incorporate the layers of resistance into the cloud, I
could also fully incorporate negative fantasy there as well. In early 2012 as I prepared the material on
the layers of resistance and the systemic cloud I wrote out the whole of the
Abilene Paradox story as a systemic cloud.
Fantasy forms an important part of the change matrix and therefore
also the assumptions of the cloud. I
wrote this at the same time as the Chicago presentation because it was
intended to be a seamless flow-on from that.
It is my absolute intention to present this material publically. If anyone
should find an original of the CRM Learning audio tape cassettes by Jerry
Harvey in their corporate archive, or their car glove-box, I would hugely
appreciate knowing about it. Credit once
again to Bill Dettmer. Bill has been
the source of any number of important tips for a very long time and I deeply
appreciate that. He has issues with
the potential for error through inductive fallacy with the 3 cloud method and
I accept those reservations although I would simultaneously hope that any
such errors are also pregnant with potential.
That is, after all, how we learn.
But he also issued me with 3 clouds one day in 2003 and said; “find a
generic cloud in that!” Except that I
did! It must have been good because he
replied; “how did you do that?” Well,
in actuality I think that there must be something universal about this device
and this powerpoint and presentation at TOCICO in New York 2011 explains the
knowledge for how I did what I did, and my understanding of why the cloud
works as it does. The systemic
cloud is, for me, the basis of all of our work and I tried to draw together a
number of apparently disparate threads – often from science – into a
consistent weave. Described at the
time as “profound,” I do hope that you will learn something from it. PowerPoint & Video Link. Just four or five weeks after the New York
conference I took a week of leave to work on material for this website. I had doodled the layers of resistance and
the various Thinking Process methods into the change matrix at New York, I
had been able to do that for some time and I thought that everyone else could
do this too, although now I am not so sure.
The thought occurred to me that; for
a cloud to “stand open,” for a conflict to still exist, for a conflict to
remain unresolved, then we can’t have fully overcome the layers of
resistance. The layers of resistance
must therefore be in the cloud somewhere and if I could fit the change matrix
to the cloud then I would know where the layers of resistance were too. I single-mindedly tried to “fit” the
change matrix into the cloud for most of that week – and it wouldn’t work. And
then, suddenly towards the end of that week it did work. There is
indeed an inherent simplicity between two diagonals in the change matrix and
the two arms of the systemic cloud.
The change matrix adds sufficiency to the necessity of the cloud –
like a glove slipping over a hand. A
long-time expert of clouds, and the wizard of
the double jeopardy, later described this work as “simply brilliant.” As I worked on this presentation I realized that I
“had been here before,” some of the constructs that I had earlier used for
negative fantasy – previously written out as assumptions but not derived from
the change matrix – followed exactly this same form. This work was
presented at TOCICO in Chicago in 2012 as one of the 3 finalists in the
inaugural Goldratt Foundation New Knowledge Award. It explains how these entities; the layers
of resistance, the change matrix, and the systemic cloud, map into a
consistent whole. I used the
Copernican Revolution at the time of Copernicus to illustrate the process. Master this and you will be able to write
hugely better systemic clouds very much faster than you can imagine. PowerPoint & Video Link. I prepared
this in response to a question from the selection judges for the presentation
above. We have been taught that there are
two change matrices for every cloud; one for each side of a local/local
conflict, or one for each side of a local/global conflict. And yet the cloud and the change matrix
work that I have presented above use only one matrix. How come?
Well, the reason is that only one diagonal in each case is really
valid, and they are complementary – so rather like someone who has let their
eyes go cross-eyed and then focused again, the two matrices merge into
one. There is utility in this, once
you know the mechanics of it. PowerPoint Link. Efrat Goldratt
uses a 9 layer resistance as a change scheme.
In what is effectively a note to myself I show that some of the excuses
that I have heard about change are really verbalizations of Efrat’s layer 2
and I show where they map into the change matrix as we hear them and then
relate that back to the correct quadrant of origin. PowerPoint Link. Dr Sergey
Ivanov and I presented a short discussion at the Chicago conference entitled
“why good people go bad.” It was full of good things from Elliott
Jaques and Eli Goldratt. I felt that
the message wasn't well understood and so I decided to write it down (and
extend it). I think that the little
diagram that was presented is important, and too few people really understand
the dynamics that we face every day. ·
The
first part is mechanistic – the rationale for having passive wrong done
within a system. ·
The
second part is behavioristic – the rationale for actively doing wrong in a
system. This material
is in an older powerpoint format and I am in the process of porting it to a
newer one, but I will leave the commentary almost exactly as it was in the
original. PowerPoint Link. In the terms
of Thomas Kuhn, this is a “mopping-up” operation; it fell out of the change
matrix while working on the various aspects of negative fantasy. There are a series of “towards” and “away
from” pairs both within and across quadrants that have a hitherto unknown
richness. It allows us to bounce
around the matrix much faster, knowing what people tell us, and indeed don’t
tell us, and how and where to map it.
A senior consultant and logistical solutions author of some standing
described this as “absolutely fantastic.”
Well he would wouldn’t he, after all, I did all the work. This is a language issue, a subtlety really,
concerning the layers of resistance. There is a very short webpage on this. In his essays The Abilene Paradox and also Eichmann In The
Organization, Jerry Harvey used the concept of negative fantasy to
show why we allow the unallowable. He
drew upon Hannah Arendt’s 1963 work Banality of Evil in his discussion of how
good people go bad. Negative fantasy
has served me well in understanding why clouds “stand open;” and why it is
that we fail to resolve or dissolve conflict.
But that didn’t tell me why we allow such a conflict to form in the
first place. However, Reicher, Haslam, and Rath do
provide such a mechanism in their 2008 paper Making a
Virtue of Evil which re-examines Arendt’s work in some
detail. I am indebted to Ross Milne of
Auckland University of Technology for bringing this material to my attention
and for providing an on-going and broader philosophical context to this
discussion. Why is it that
we do what we know that we should not do, and why is it that we don’t do what
we know that we should do? Why is it that
we rifle cash from the till? Why is it
that we; steal, cheat, and lie? Why is
it that we behave; unethically, immorally, and inauthentically? Why do we; subjugate, enslave, and even
kill others? What is it that causes us
to cause harm to others? There is a
cloud, a form, or maybe it’s a meta-form, that accommodates each and every
one these issues. It wasn’t simple to
get there, there was a lot of soul searching, several false leads, and at the
end I felt that all that I had done was to have gone around in a circle and
as they say, come to know the place that I started from for the first
time. The end result is very simple –
as it should be. To describe
the problem in a cloud is of course one thing. To describe the solution is quite
another. Fortunately I went to a
presentation a short time later by Nora Bateson, the daughter of Gregory
Bateson, who had produced a film called An Ecology of Mind. And there, buried in a “sound
bite” by one of the interviewees, was the necessary resolution. Once again very simple, just as it should
be. Not long after
the Chicago conference in June 2012, and as a consequence of a draft of the
change matrix presentation mentioned above, Karl Buckridge introduced me to the
work of Robert Frtiz. Karl had known
of this material for a decade or more but that others had not taken it
up. I was of course tempted to say at
the time “… and who the hell is Robert Fritz?” But, if I had paid more attention, then I
would have known that the dynamic tension diagram in Senge’s book, The Fifth Discipline, the one with a figure standing
between two elastic bands pulling in two opposing directions – and embedded
in my memory – is the work of Robert Fritz.
You know, if we collectively paid more attention to these external
sources, then collectively we would learn a great deal more about clouds, and
sooner, than we currently do. The path of
least resistance is the oscillation that we experience when we constantly
compromise between the conflicted entities of two local wants; a little in
one direction, then a little in the other direction, backwards and forwards,
backwards and forwards. We call these
dilemma. For instance, make batches
bigger which extends lead time, followed by making batches smaller which
increases setup, and so it goes. But
Frtiz is nothing if not clever; he has a way out of this conflict structure,
something that he called the senior structure and that which we would call a
systemic cloud. The way to get there
is called “transcendence.” Now,
immediately, this invokes images of smoky scenes of 1960’s California,
something that I was far too young to appreciate that I was missing at the
time. But it also means more than that
too. Senior structures, are systemic
clouds, by a different name. Fritz also
outlined “conflict manipulation;” the thing that people do to stay inside
their comfort zones, their path of least resistance, which is very close to
the work that we have done on the change matrix and remains to be presented
yet in terms of negative fantasy. The
systemic cloud and Robert Fritz isn’t a very big piece of work – just a few
critical diagrams really, but it changes my conception of clouds and their
presentation. It is incredibly
important to what we do; logistically, and within the logical thinking process. Problems need
to be solved at a higher logical level than that at which they were
created. But to get there requires a
unique transitional structure. Once
again it is my absolute intention to present this material publically (see
below). Somehow I got
it into my head around about the time of the 2011 New York conference that
there was a cloud in Neil Diamond’s song I am I said. A few of us were sitting out on the deck at
the Palisades one evening amongst the fireflies and the bullfrogs – and there
may or may not have been some red wine involved – and I mentioned this
fact. Someone reached for their iPhone
and downloaded the lyrics and confirmed my suspicion. I wrote a
couple of draft clouds at the time, but I couldn’t’ “crack” it until I had
completed the work on Robert Frtiz in early 2013. The song is a lament about the past and the
present, it is a local/local cloud, possibly with a systemic solution
somewhere in the future, but we can only guess at that. Download it, put it on your iPhone, play it
to people. PowerPoint Link. Let me add a
little more. I wrote this cloud using
the simple rule below. I didn’t use a matrix
at all. But recently I did map the
assumptions back into a matrix. The
result was quite surprising. This is a
true internal dilemma, a “musing” as Jaques would call it. It is still a dialectic, an argument
between two parts of a mind, but it also has characteristics that are
distinctive to internal dilemmas. You
can find a 1972 promotional clip here that provides further insight. There is one simple rule for the assumptions of the
cloud. The assumptions on any one side
consist of the positives of that side and the avoidance of the negatives of
the other side. There is a webpage on this. If we move the concepts of satisfaction and security
from the needs of the cloud and into the quadrants of the change matrix, then
we must also add in dissatisfaction and insecurity as well. These 4 issues then have surprising
consequences when represented as assumptions for the cloud rather than as the
entities within the cloud. Why don’t
you have a look at this, it is important.
It shows more than ever what we must do to ensure that change, or
rather, improvement, takes place. We
must work to overcome people’s preconceptions of insecurity. There is a webpage on
this. Much of the material here finds
its way into a later webinar. David Anthony of Boeing Corporation has recently
coined the term loco/loco clouds and that slightly infectious name has more
than a hint of truth to it if you should be fortunate enough to be standing
outside an argument between two principals/principles rather than caught up
as one of the participants. Gregory
Bateson coined a term; schismogenesis, to describe just exactly how such a
schism between two people or two groups of people can arise, become mutually
reinforcing, and eventually out of control.
It is not so much the content of the disagreement, but the context,
the mechanism, which is the real issue. Eli Goldratt in the seventh of his eight-part
Satellite Series/Self-Learning Program, addresses the topic of managing
people; one of the topics is communication, or perhaps more importantly
mis-communication. Many times when we
are presented with a new idea we forget to praise it by summarizing its
benefits and we are also perceived to criticize it by pointing out the valid
reservations that we might have. But
this is just one “inventor” and one neutral party; most probably a
subordinate and a superior. What if we
have two inventors, peer to peer, and no neutral parties? Well then we have a local/local cloud. As they say an eye for an eye causes much
blindness. We, the inventor of our
side, are proud of our invention but blind to its shortcomings which the
other side will see and point out.
They may not only forget to praise our idea, they may in fact be blind
to the benefits of it because they don’t see the problem that we are seeking
to address and so criticism is indeed all that we will receive. On the other hand, they, the inventor of their side,
are proud of their invention but blind to its shortcomings which we will see
and point out. We may not only forget
to praise their idea, we may in fact be blind to the benefits of it because
we don’t see the problem that they are seeking to address and so criticism is
indeed all that we will give out. Do you see the potential to go schismogenic in this
two-sided problem of positive intent?
The cyberneticians saw it only too
well. I wrote this out initially as
two local matrices with no cloud – the schismogenesis is in the assumptions
(or rather blindness to them). There
are shades of this in the following webinar in the concepts of impact and
intent. Nevertheless, it is quite easy
to show in simple graphical form the issue of pride-of-the-inventor and
mis-communication; they are the inverse of each other. I purposefully skipped this in the 2013 webinars;
there was much else to show first. I
intend to return to this and two other issues, confirmation bias, and
contrasting, which can be shown in similar form. I have a colleague
who often used to mention to me the need to have the “difficult
conversations” – not with me of course, but with other people during the
course of his work. We used to bandy
this word around and somehow I gravitated towards the book by that name, Difficult
Conversations by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen. It comes from a good pedigree – the Harvard
Negotiation Project – home of Getting To Yes and also Getting Past No. These two books, my editions are in
striking blue and yellow paperback, have followed me around since the
mid-1990’s, the earlier of the two being first published in 1981. Their concept of “intent” and “impact”
informed me in totality as I tried to describe the role of the change matrix
and the local/local cloud. I was
exceedingly pleased that two totally disparate systems – Goldratt’s Thinking
Process and the Harvard Negotiation Project – could seemingly triangulate in
on the same issues. A number of people
mentioned to me that Crucial Conversations by Kerry Paterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler
was also worthwhile, and indeed it is.
I drew from their work too. The change
matrix, matrices actually, and the cloud is a superb way to navigate through
these dialectic issues. I haven’t done
it full justice yet. PowerPoint & Webinar Link. I had a copy
of Peter Blocks Flawless Consulting for some years, and as is sometimes the
case, I tried to start it several times.
In the end I applied my reserve strategy – or maybe that should be
reverse strategy – and I read from the back to the front. That was a very useful exercise; there is
much to learn from him. But it also
sent me in search of his book on Stewardship.
This is a book that narrowly lost out to Robert’s Greenleaf’s Servant
Leadership in 2005. How I wish I had
have read both instead of imposing an either/or choice. The upshot is that Peter Block gave me a
handle on a series of issues that allowed me to address local/global clouds
in much more detail than I have previously. Once again the
main objective was to better show the integration between the change matrix
and the cloud, but I got more than I bargained for. PowerPoint & Webinar Link. I original
read several books by Elliott Jaques in mid-2007 and they are utterly remarkable
in their concept and content. In
Ackoff’s terminology, in Theory of Constraints we have a solution for the
horizontal interaction or co-ordination problem, and Jaques has a solution
for the vertical interaction or integration problem. The two were made to go together. Somewhere I became aware of Jaques concept
of “quintaves” in human thinking maturation.
It was hard enough at that time to find people who even knew of
Elliott Jaques, but when you know where to look you start to find them. But I still couldn’t find anyone who could
explain to me what Jaques meant by quintaves.
That is, I couldn’t visualize it.
However in re-reading Polanyi’s Tacit Dimension, and being more awake
to the importance of emergence in our thought process, a scheme to explain
Jaques’ quintaves fell into place. That relevance
of this is there are a number of people within Theory of Constraints who can
see “cross-over” with Jaques’ overarching system known as Requisite
Organization, and I hope that I have developed a better connection between
Jaques and Goldratt. PowerPoint Link. Someone asked
me at the end of the 2013 webinar session on dialectic arguments and
local/local clouds how the intent and impact that I had mapped was related to
the original change matrix. The answer
is that I didn’t know. I had used the
Harvard Negotiation Projects approach to arrive at the description that I had
and this approach is quite independent of Theory of Constraints. Nevertheless the question continued to bug
me because I felt that there ought to be a relationship, a connection. I have put a lot of value on the
relationship that exists between the change matrix, the layers of resistance,
and the systemic cloud after all.
Surely these aspects too, must also map into the local cloud with
similar ease? Well the
answer is that indeed they do.
Recently I put together a brief PowerPoint to explain this and
circulated it to a limited number of people.
I hope to be able to present this in the upcoming 2014 Winter Webinar
Series with TOCICO. There are
several things that I omitted in 2013 that I hope to show this time
including; confirmation bias, pride of the inventor, contrasting, and
mis-communication. I think that there
is a general utility in this approach and I hope to be able to demonstrate
this. This is the
second and more presentable half of the work below (knowledge and structure). Piaget’s book Structuralism
gave me a coat-hanger, or rather the authority to use a coat-hanger to
explain many of the aspects of systems that I tacitly “knew” but maybe had
not explicitly described very well. It
especially explained to me the thing that causes the transformation into a
system. I also managed to incorporate
Theory of Constraints into it, as well as Kaizen and Kaikaku. I wrote it in part as a vaccine against the
effects of a reissue of a book by Robert Jackall
entitled Moral Mazes which shows what happens
when the short-term and self-interest overrides the long-term and common-interest
in corporate business. PowerPoint Link. This is the
first half of the work above on systems and structure. I first read Polanyi’s “little book” The Tacit Dimension while multi-tasking. I took it with me to a workshop in
Australia on hospital theater scheduling in early 2011. All that my colleague and I learnt at that
workshop was that no one knew what they were on about – but you frequently
find that in healthcare. Some of
Polanyi’s work must have “sunk in” because it found its way into the
presentation for New York that year.
Sadly some of it did not sink in – especially his concept of
emergence, or rather the importance that he placed upon it. I re-read that book in early 2014, along
with Frans Osinga’s book on Boyd, and then Piaget’s book on structuralism. The consequence of that was the
construction of a new coat-hanger, or a carpet bag, or a scrapbook, that I
could put a whole lot of related observations from these people and others. If we want to teach others how to think,
then we need to be ahead of our own game – do we not? PowerPoint Link. Gregory Bateson used the term “a double bind” which
I have alluded to in various places.
It is generally mis-understood.
People think that a double bind is somehow like a cloud – two arms
that seem to be beyond resolution.
This is incorrect. The “double”
in the bind is about what we “can’t say” rather than what we can say. It is a cloud for sure, but within a
broader sociological or psychological context that precludes honest
description of what is really going on.
Social interactions with schizophrenia-like outcomes are a good example. When we fail to address the “mermaids” that
we fear may be lost, and/or we fail to address the “crutches” that we fear we
might gain, then the outcome will be a double blind. The cloud is bound once by its apparently
irresolvable dilemma and a second time by our fear of our own assumptions. For social interactions with schizophrenia-like out
comes read “most modern business.” People do not
sit around, helpless, in vacuum waiting for a solution to “pop” into
view. No, they seek to solve their
existing problems with more of their existing solution, which cause more of
their existing problem and so on and on.
I tried to stress this in my development of the New York presentation
on the systemic cloud. If we look at
the layers of resistance, or as I have suggested on a separate page here, the
layers of understanding, then this looks too much like “they don’t understand
the problem” and indeed this is true – but they are hardly likely to see like
that. This issue
must have been simmering along, because in the webinar on didactic arguments
and the local/global cloud – a systemic cloud by another name – I use the
term “a telling.” Because that is what
it looks like often enough to the parts who are the recipients of our
message. This was further highlighted
to me more recently in a passing comment in Robert Jackall’s
Moral Mazes where he refers to the “didactic self-righteousness of those
privileged to receive some ideological enlightenment.” Ouch, is that us do you think? Well, let me
answer that in two stages. Stage
One. Various authors note examples
where Toyota Supplier Support Center in the U.S. or the GG group have brought
about rapid – literally overnight – improvements to firms that submit to
their expertise, their authority, whereas others stumble along for years
claiming this or than initiative and achieving very little or no real
improvement. The same is too often
true for us as well. The point being
that in actuality the didactic self-righteous in these industrial examples do
indeed know what they are doing. The
evidence is in the success of the prior endeavors. Once someone is willing to submit to that
sort of expertise, to that sort of authority, then substantial improvements
will happen very rapidly. So what stops
this from happening? Well we stop it
from happening actually. Stage
Two. l I
think that we are failing to acknowledge the vigor in which people have tried
to implement their own solutions first.
If people try and fail and try again it would be reasonable to
conclude that the problem can’t be fixed or that not enough of the fix was
supplied. What we do when we start to
search for undesirable effects (UDE’s) is that we preclude their solutions
from the mix. I know this because I do
it. We are at pains to make sure that
we only get symptoms. We do this so
that we can build back to an unencumbered current reality tree. If you like we build the case for the
alligators so that we can show the ladder to the pot of gold. This is our matrix (or at least one
diagonal of it). But the people we are
working with have been told by us to ignore the ladder that they want to construct – and indeed have tried to construct on
many occasions in the past. They are
stuck there, because of what we haven’t done – and that is to acknowledge
their matrix (or at least one diagonal of it). So where is
this leading? Well we tend to present
a systemic cloud as a fate-accompli.
As a didactic argument. It
is not. The didact
is the outcome, it is the ends, it is not the means. We jump a step because we know where we are
going, but the people we wish to help don’t know that yet. It is the means not the ends that we have
to concentrate on at first, and the means is a dialogue, a dialectic. As Ross Milne at Auckland University of
Technology keeps telling me, you can teach a didactic argument dialectically
and a dialectic argument didactically.
What I am suggesting is that the first cloud is dialectic and there
are two arms to it that are essentially isolated from one another. I have also drawn this so often in the
past, for more than a decade in fact.
For me that is part of how to understand paradigm – just draw half a
cloud, and pretend the other half does not exist. But there is
something more now. At least for
me. There is a matrix that goes with
each of the halves in isolation and that matrix is a personal or absolute
matrix. These are about the
frustration of no change, or glacially slow incremental change. They have one, and we have one. Each matrix has two diagonals. Once we begin to interact, then we produce
change matrices or relative matrices.
These are about the conflict of changing. They are a different thing. We have to work through that dialectic, our
new change versus their old change.
Frankly we don’t do this at the moment. And to do this
effectively – and I will get out my washtub and bang on it again – we can’t
tell people, we can only show them, and most often we can only show them in a
non-threatening simulation – a game by any other word, a learning game. We are so awash with our own sophistication
or our own insecurity with everyone else’s apparent sophistication that we
hardly have this skill anymore. We
used to have it. We need to
reteach it to ourselves once again and we need to learn how to better engage
in dialogue. We know much more than we
can tell. Let’s get on with it. In this
webinar I revisit the role of the matrices in the cloud that I started last
year and show how this is directly related to the language of the change
matrix. There is a one-to-one mapping
between the change matrix and the Harvard Negotiation Project’s notion of
difficult conversations and this is important to understand. I also liberally trawl through a number of
the concepts found in Peter Block’s work and relate these to conflict clouds.
PowerPoint Link Robert Fritz
in The Path of Least Resistance raises
transcendence as the method of developing a solution to an inherent
conflict. In fact the word “transcendence”
is commonly employed in these circumstances by many people. But there was no mechanism or mechanics for
doing so outside of “creativity” and the focusing effect of his concept of a
senior organizing principle. Nonetheless one of his dilemma examples seemed
to me to call for the need of an “interim” or transient structure built
around a 3-armed cloud. A sort of
half-way house between dilemma and a systemic solution. In this webinar I demonstrate the mechanics
involved to get from a dilemma to such a transcendent solution and then
repeat it for the classic operations problem of big batch vs. small batch. PowerPoint Link Could I ever have imagined that I might stop using
clouds or at least drawing them as a matter of first choice? No way!
But that is what has unfolded in the last while. As I worked on the two webinars above I was
quite conscious that my attention was moving more and more towards the matrix
and further and further away from the clouds that the matrix was supposed to
be supporting. I have called this matrix
the intent impact matrix. In fact the matrices tell a better story
than the clouds do, but I pressed on with the webinar because the 3-armed cloud
is something that I had known about for several years and I really wanted to
show that it existed and how useful it could be in finding a transcendent
solution. However, since January 2015 I have not drawn a
single cloud. That is something akin to cold-turkey (of the drug addiction
kind). Except I’ve found something
better. I am well into writing a book manuscript for
this. For those data quants amongst us
for whom this may mean something; currently this effort sits at 65,000 words,
or 170 pages if you include the 90 or so diagrams as well. I hope to be able to complete this by
75,000 words. I want this published, I
have a publisher in mind. Much as in the 2014 webinars, there is are 3 states;
didactic, dialectic, dilemma, and a 4th which I call
transcendent. The process or sequence
is iterative, it loops; the transcendent solution developed from a conflict
or a dilemma loops back to the start of a new cycle at the didactic stage, a
sort of PDCA – and so it goes. Perhaps the most critical aspect is also the
simplest, each of these stages is graphically related to each other. There is a transform required, but the
transform is no more difficult than a fold of a whole matrix or the rotation
of a part of a matrix. I think that this
is going to be so important in making conflicts and their solution more
accessible to so many more people. As I continued to work on this material my
competence in doing so improves. It
has forced me to clarify my thinking on a number of critical aspects. As a consequence of this, things have become
more consistent, and as things have become more consistent so too has my confidence
that this is the right track. OK, it
needs some road-testing, but I only expect that to improve things even more. Notes A note on the
term “Logical Thinking Process.” I
slipped into using this term on this page for the very first time. Bill Dettmer coined the term and has been
using it for some years. There is a
distinction between the earlier term, Thinking Process (TP), and the more
recent term the Logical Thinking Process (LTP) – which I have to admit I
failed to appreciate. TP includes
the use of the 3 cloud method and the strategy and tactics trees. LTP excludes these but additionally
includes the IO-Map for setting direction.
Sometimes of course I feel that I am dancing between the raindrops. I have shown on this page that the 3 cloud
works, and why it works, and acknowledge the reservations about inductive
fallacy. But then all induction, if in
fact induction should exist, potentially suffers from this fallacy and I will
continue to take that risk rather than the risk of not thinking at all. The Thinking Process/Logical Thinking
Process is still very immature and there is a lot to learn yet. Things that we don’t know that we don’t
know. Scary – huh? This Webpage Copyright © 2014-2015 by Dr K. J.
Youngman |