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A Guide to Implementing the Theory of
Constraints (TOC) |
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Some Background My first crude
Excel dice simulators date from 1997 or thereabouts. I guess that a lot of other people have also
made such efforts through their own volition or in response to class-work requirements,
although I have not seen any of these.
I took my early effort to a healthcare providers’ conference and ran
it “live” on-screen. That was
sufficient to show me just how little intuition we have for these “facts of
life.” Since that time I have
revisited these simulators on numerous occasions, getting better all of the
time. You will have seen the more
basic and singular example earlier in this website. That particular iteration has been around
since early 2009. This is the classic
case direct from The Goal. The link page
is here Balanced Line Dice Simulator If you go deep
into the bowels of Theory of Constraints you will find that the likes of the
late John Caspari and others were tinkering around with these sorts of things
a long time ago and in doing so proving to themselves things that are
either/or; ·
Counterintuitive ·
Would
take a lot of time to do in real-life with all of its confounding issues. People such as
Karl Buckridge have always used these tacit approaches, Tim Sullivan (coordinator
of the first TOCICO Dictionary) and one or two other people have come forward
with their own individual approaches to these games using various combinations
of dice. Once you have
a basic simulator running, then you can start to play. That is the substantiation for the advanced
simulations. All of the add-ons occur
on the actual sheet, the rules if you like.
Things like the gating rules, buffer duration and so-forth. You play, you learn. This particular simulator was extensively
reworked in late 2012 and then put on the website for the first time. The link page here Advanced Dice Simulators Primarily
these simulators are to test the range of outcomes that can be expected from
playing these games out in real time with real dice. You want a result for any particular game
that is clear cut. That is how you get
this “stuff” inside of people’s heads.
Telling them, or showing them, does not work. Doing it does work. The text is written for people who want to
teach this sort of experiential learning.
You have to know it to understand it. There are in
fact still more things that you can do with such simple simulators –
additional understanding that can be brought forward. But there is more than enough here to start
with. Internalize this first. Late in 2014,
in preparation for a new commitment, and over a period of time that I wouldn’t
like to divulge, I finally rebuilt the simulator from the ground up. That means each part is a module – as I
imagine a programmer would program – that is what I always wanted to do with it,
but when things just “grow” that’s not how it happens. And if you didn’t know what you wanted
before you had it, how could you have “designed it?” And then having two simulators; an old one
and a new one, each with different dice behaviour means countless testing to
convince yourself that neither has a “bug” and that both are behaving within
their expected variation. Anyway that
is all water under the bridge. The advanced
simulator that you can access is “good enough” the one that you can’t access
is even better. That it is better came
about through some serendipity and a commercial supplier of dice; the behaviour
of which is just about perfect for what we are trying to show. Once again the simulators are a way of
testing these games based upon real dice. This Webpage Copyright © 2014- 2015 by Dr K. J.
Youngman |