The Goal

• Most everyone is introduced to TOC in the same way–they read “The Goal1)” by Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt
• The story in the book is compelling and many people see themselves in it
  • Alex, the main character, is a factory manager who has been given 90 days to significantly improve the profit of his factory or it will be closed down and everyone will lose their jobs
  • At the same time, because he’s spending so much time trying to solve work problems, his marriage is on the rocks and he’s got to try to save that, too
  • A chance encounter with Jonah, an old college professor of Alex’s turned consultant sets the stage for Alex’s eventual success
• “The Goal” is essentially one long teaching story
  • Jonah periodically gives Alex some hints to guide his thinking, but never complete answers
  • Alex figures out what to do on his own
  • By the end of the book most readers see the solutions for production planning that Alex came up with and usually conclude that it was “just common sense”

Looking through a Cynefin lens

• Alex’s company started out in the Simple Domain
  • Not because it was appropriate, but because they had been over constrained by mandated policies, goals, objectives, budgets and schedules
• This drove them into Chaos, where they are when the book starts
  • facing constant expediting
  • late deliveries and
  • unhappy customers….and bosses
• The appearance of Jonah gives Alex some initial steps to take
  • Stabilize the chaos
  • Explore new and novel approaches to managing his factory by focusing on the system constraint (the most heavily loaded machine)
  • Rather than trying to schedule everything, he acknowledges that variation will exist and mitigates it by aggregating the variation
  • He manages the emergence of beneficial coherence with attractors within constraints (boundaries)
    • Alex’s “safe-fail” experiments within the Complex Domain give him some good ideas as to how to improve performance
  • He and his team analyze the results and develop some simple rules sets to help them make decisions (they move the issue into the Complicated Domain)
• The book story is a journey from Simple to Chaos to Complex to Complicated and the characters learn how to make increasing sense of their world and get better and better at acting appropriately in it

Complex Facilitation

• Jonah is only in the book a few times
• He asks Socratic questions and makes a few comments and yet what he says is critical to Alex deriving the solution
• Jonah is a Complex Domain Master–it only takes a few minutes of conversation with Alex for Jonah to fully understand what is happening in the factory
• Rather than telling Alex the answer, he uses his questions and comments to guide him to the answer
• As is the case for many Complex Domain problems, once solved the answer appears to have been fairly obvious or, requiring a bit of analysis at most

Bottom line: “The Goal” is one of the classics of business reading. It’s widely available and it’s worth a read. It captures the pressure that factory managers are under and gives you a sense that there is, indeed, a better way to manage.