TOCICO

Despite its well-known origins in production, popularized through The Goal, theory of constraints (TOC) is far more than a production philosophy – it can be applied to many other areas. As each new problem or environment was tackled, Dr Goldratt and his colleagues developed new solutions. But along with these new solutions, they also thought about how they thought about the problems, and how they went about devising solutions. The thinking processes (TP) are a distillation of their approach to problem solving and decision making – a codification of their thinking about their thinking. The result is a set of tools we can use ourselves to solve problems in our own lives, regardless of how complex or everyday they may be. This workshop provides an overview of the thinking processes, its component TP tools and logic rules that are used to create TP logic diagrams to represent situations and their resolution. We describe the original set of tools / diagrams, including the current reality tree and evaporating cloud, as well as more recent additions. We explain how they are created and used, and how they fit together to answer the key questions of change: why change, what to change, to what to change, how to cause and how to sustain the change. We explain the two types of logic used in the diagrams, namely necessity and sufficiency logic. We outline the set of logic rules, referred to as the ‘categories of legitimate reservation’, which help us scrutinize the logic statements in order to construct robust trees as well as scrutinize others’ diagrams.